


But.

by forochel



Series: metathesis//but. [2]
Category: GOT7
Genre: (kind of), Canon Universe, Character Study, Epistolary, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up, I didn't need to go this hard, M/M, What Have I Done, bildungsroman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-01-16 03:14:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21264149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forochel/pseuds/forochel
Summary: Companion fic tometathesis, from Jaebeom's POV. Except it is obviously A LOT MORE INVOLVED.How Jaebeom went from being a Teenage Dirtbag to Park Jinyoung's Devoted Husband: A Bildungsroman.





	1. 2012

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: This is a work of FANTASY based on fictional representations of real people. If you are or personally know any of the people tagged up above, please for both our sakes' hit backspace/the x button right the fuck now. 
> 
> \---  
this was originally supposed to be a largely epistolary fic, like, 7 diary-entry-letter things (a la the thirteen letters, that stucky classic) that jaebeom wrote about jinyoung + 1 jinyoung wrote back to jaebeom after they got together.
> 
> HAHAHA. ha. this also started out as an exercise in me learning to write jaebeom's POV and then it EXPLODED the MORE I LEARNT about jaebeom's EMOTIONAL JOURNEY to becoming A BETTER PERSON. 
> 
> big thanks to bysine for literally holding my hand through this (and still is), writing ME reams of fic whilst I struggled to eke out like 100 words per week t or something equally dismal, and being such a great reactor. and also to mia, with whom I think I yelled about the initial idea for this and who bellowed at great length and volume and linkage in my general direction about jaebeom's Growth. 
> 
> I have a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6HCEOAqY5a9J5S0BXvOIoY?si=qEP_zj8lTZqsQewaMC6KmQ) for this whole fucking thing that generally tracks the emotional arc.
> 
> The epigraph is from the inesteemable Jamie Woon's Shoulda.

**You and I, connected;  
You and I and the blood and the bone**

> _Why. _
> 
> _It drives me crazy - the way you act - the way **I** act around you. I don’t know what you’re thinking half the time and I don’t understand what you’re doing the other half. It makes me want to — _

Jaebeom scores a thick, splotchy line across the page, watches as the ink feathers out. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, to be honest. Not to punch or yell — well, maybe yell — or kick. Dawn seeps through the curtains, but he’s still buzzing from filming all night in Dongdaemun, still worked up, still tied up in knots over some tangled snarl of conflicting impulses.

He can’t stop thinking. He’s so tired. He just wants to fall asleep and wake up in a world where the boy he’s supposed to be working with, the boy currently making whuffling noises in his sleep, in his own room, _makes sense_.

*

_Two hours ago_

“It was nice her of her to be so positive,” Jinyoung says lightly to their manager, Jaebeom a few steps behind. “All things considered.”

Jaebeom almost misses a step, catches himself in time. Does Jinyoung know that Jaebeom can hear him over the din of Dongdaemun? The cameramen are doing long shots, now, so there is a low chance of him being overhead at least.

“You don’t believe in fortune telling?” Manager-hyung asks, indulgent laughter in his voice. It feels like there’s a knot in Jaebeom’s throat.

Jinyoung turns his head just enough so that Jaebeom can see the sweet, soft moue of his mouth, the aegyo-sal creasing in the corner of his right eye as he shakes his head up at their manager. “Why should I? She knew she was being filmed anyway.”

Manager-hyung laughs. Jaebeom can see that he’s charmed despite himself, and it sets off a roiling in his belly. He can’t tell if it’s — jealousy, or resentment, or just plain irritation. Jinyoung does all these strange things that usually only girls do, even off-camera, and it — it itches.

“Aren’t you too young to be such a sceptic, Jinyoung-ah?”

“You aren’t that much older yourself, hyung,” Jinyoung says cheekily, and then he yawns abruptly.

It’s ridiculously late, and the adrenaline of being out on town — even with cameras trailing them — is starting to wear off. Jaebeom isn’t feeling too steady himself. Maybe that’s why his feelings are going haywire.

“Old enough to tell you to enjoy your innocence,” Manager-hyung says, and pats Jinyoung twice between his narrow shoulders.

"What innocence?" Jinyoung laughs quietly. "I have two older sisters."

"And yet you never introduce them," laments Manager-hyung. That, at least, makes Jaebeom snort.

They’ve got to the carpark now for one last filming segment, and Jinyoung heads straight for the van whilst one of the production assistants produces a skateboard from nowhere.

“Seriously, Jinyoungie?” Jaebeom says before he can help it.

Jinyoung turns, leaning against the van door. “Remember what happened when they tried to make me tumble?” His voice is a little sharp, not nearly bubbly enough, and the PD makes a throat-slashing motion.

So Jaebeom forces himself to laugh, even though this bit will probably be cut anyway. “Yeah, all right, hyung to the rescue.”

Hyung to the rescue apparently means embarrassing himself on a skateboard and doing his best to laugh it all off.

Jaebeom is sore and exhausted from an entire day of practice, then putting it on for the cameras, dealing with Jinyoung’s ... _everything_. He just wants to shower and crawl into bed and listen to music while waiting for sleep to take him. He wants to put in his earphones now, but he can’t, because they’re buried somewhere at the bottom of his backpack, which is somewhere in the back of the van.

And Jinyoung is fidgeting across the gap between their seats, like some kind of overtired toddler who’s now in the hyperactive stage of exhaustion, the glow of his tablet casting strange shadows on his face.

Turning his face firmly to the window, Jaebeom tries and fails not to dwell on the many falls he took, on making a fool out of himself for the camera. Fucking ... everything.

The problem with stewing in his frustration is that when they’re finally so, so close to rest and bed and _peace_, Jinyoung opens his mouth and tells Jaebeom he was cool when he had been anything _but_, and Jaebeom — cannot deal. He can’t tell, this dizzy with exhaustion and the general low-level buzz that starts up under his skin whenever he’s around Jinyoung, if Jinyoung is mocking him or trying to be nice. Either way it rankles: mockery and patronisation alike.

He can feel Manager-hyung looking significantly at him, and just barely manages to duck his head and refute Jinyoung’s ridiculous claim to the tiled floor of the lift.

The lift doors thankfully open. He walks out.


	2. 2012/13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> playlist songs: The Day / Stronger / Better Man
> 
> these are not going to be extremely joyful chapters! but I like to think there's still some humour to them. 
> 
> also this chapter comes with an Asian Parents warning. they're good parents, just Very Asian. I channelled my entire cultural memory here.

* * *

They’re given time off to go home, after JJ Project is shelved.

Jinyoung leaves on the next train out, throwing things into a duffle bag while Jaebeom stands awkwardly by his door, trying to come up with something to say.

"Jinyoung-ah...." Jaebeom trails off.

"What?"

He's clearly dropped all pretences — all those stolen moments of camaraderie forged through mutual excitement and exhaustion clearly obliterated. Jaebeom wonders if any of it had ever been genuinely felt. It is hard to conceive of; after all, when Jaebeom is happy, he's happy. When he's sad, he's sad. When he's angry — well.

The harsh buzz of Jinyoung aggressively zipping his duffle shut jerks Jaebeom out of his thoughts.

"I have a train to catch," Jinyoung says tersely. "So if you don't have anything to say —" his voice cracks; Jinyoung flushes and stands. "— then move aside."

Just yesterday, this would have had Jaebeom flaring up.

As it is, he's been walking around in a fugue state since their CEO had leaned over his desk, all fake sympathy, and dropped the bomb on them. Walking around feeling like his ears have been filled with cotton, or his head is being held underwater. He's drowning on dry land.

Jaebeom's initial flare of indignation, the instinctual demand to ask _Why, what, how dare you_ had been so, so quickly snuffed out by words like "numbers" and "sales" and "market saturation" and "timing" and "redeploy your potential". Big words — too big for an eighteen-year-old who’d barely survived high school.

Next to him, Jinyoung had been as stiff as a vampire. His fingers, Jaebeom had noticed out of the corner of his eyes, had been twisting together in his lap. The acid in Jaebeom's stomach had roiled.

Here and now, Jaebeom moves aside. Still aimless, helpless, wordless.

Jinyoung's eyes are wide and round and dark. There's a look on his face Jaebeom can't read. This isn't anything new, really. It's so hard to tell what Jinyoung is thinking until he bares his claws for all the _numbers_ CEO-nim had quoted to see. Maybe that's why they're being fridged. Maybe it was getting too obvious, how much this dynamic duo were bashing themselves against each other's rough, jagged corners.

Something compels Jaebeom to trail Jinyoung out to the front door, where a staff member is already waiting to take Jinyoung to the train station. No one will be accompanying him down to Jinhae this time around.

"Travel safely," Jaebeom manages at last, kicking idly at the shoe rack. His skin feels too _tight_. Only the staff noona is present to witness this aching, yawning awkwardness, but already that feels too much.

The sharp look that Jinyoung gives him feels like a rebuke. Is Jaebeom not even allowed that? The surge of frustrated irritation quickly breaks upon the indifferent rocks of ... whatever this is, that has come over Jaebeom. He misses the green fields, abruptly, of his parents' land; the trees and the mountains beyond.

"Sure," Jinyoung says, turning away. "You too. Hyung."

*

Try as he might, every time Jaebeom closes his eyes he sees Jinyoung's back, turning and turned away from him.

It feels like a closing door, the resolving chord of a tune. Except not really: there is nothing fulfilling about this, nothing that feels perfect. It feels dissonant, and that's why Jaebeom is still stewing about this days after he has arrived home and ensconced himself in the careful warmth of his parents' home, back in his room.

The air smells different here. Mostly of compost and growing things; Jaebeom has never, unlike the Seoul-born city kids he's met, harboured much romanticism for farming life. What would life have been like, if he'd never left? Never made it into JYP? Would he have stayed here and become a farmer just like his parents?

_Will_ that be where he ends up, anyway? Mouldering away like the compost heap.

His conscience twinges just in time for his mother to open his door after a perfunctory knock.

"Jaebeom-ah," she says. "Get out of bed. It's past noon. You've been sleeping for two days. Make yourself useful if you're going to be eating my food."

Groaning, Jaebeom rolls out from under his covers. Trying to smother his thoughts quiet hasn't been working, in any case. "Yes, Eomma."

"Good," his mother says. "There's food on the stove. Come join us in the fields by the pond when you're done."

"You've already eaten?"

She snorts. "It's almost one."

"Oh," says Jaebeom. He genuinely had forgotten, up ‘til this moment, about what early starts his parents had. "Of course."

Laughing to herself, Eomma reaches up to squeeze his arm. "Go wash your face and wake up, Jaebeom."

"Yes, Eomma," he says obediently, and goes.

It's strange to be back here, in the confines of his old life: the same old bathroom tiles; the same smell of camphor lingering in the air; the same squeaky board he steps over on the way into the kitchen. Even his house slippers are the same, kept for his infrequent visits home and now, this longer stay.

Jaebeom eats quickly; the rice and namul, made from the various field weeds and herbs his parents intersperse the market produce with, goesdown easy. The soup, too: leftover doenjang jjigae from the night before, hearty and savoury with the leavening tang of pickled peppers. His mother's secret ingredient.

Leaving his dishes and the pot soaking in the sink, he jams a broad-brimmed hat on and makes his way out to the fields.

"Don't you have gloves?" is the first thing his father says to him when he straightens up from his stoop and spots Jaebeom approaching. "Your hands —"

"They'll be fine," Jaebeom says, affronted. He hasn't got soft hands; not with the b-boying he continues to do in his spare time and the hours he's been putting in with weights training at the gym.

Catching him by the wrist, his father inspects his palms before letting go with a snort. "We'll see."

Jaebeom's hands are very much not fine within an hour, and he is sent off to the first aid kit and to find some gloves.

"Honestly," his mother mutters as she sprays antiseptic and ignores his whine, "it doesn't matter how thick your skin is when you're _weeding_."

"I think Appa just wanted to teach me a lesson."

"Oh?" Her dark eyes, so like Jaebeom's own, curve up at him. There's a knowing glint in them. "And what is it?"

Jaebeom pauses. "Um ... don't be stupid?" 

She laughs and rolls her eyes, snapping shut the kit Jaebeom had gingerly fumbled open. "Put that away for me, there's a dear boy. Go pick the hobak in the southern field. We've planted them together with some herbs, so don't just step on anything. You remember how to cut them?"

He's about to say, "Yes, of course," when something makes him stop.

"Um," he says. "Maybe not?"

It _has_ been three years. More than that, really, since he last properly helped out.

"I thought not," she says, and pats his bum comfortingly to take the sting out of her words. It mostly works. "I will show you. Go fetch the bushels from the other shed."

*

And so the next week passes thus:

Jaebeom wakes with the sun and works the fields with his parents, an unfamiliar ache in his muscles, then falling asleep too tired out to write. He's sleeping better than he has in years. He's left alone with his thoughts, working the fields, but there is something soothing about the repetitive motions of turning soil over and pulling out weeds. Even when harvesting, stray thoughts are crowded out of his brain by judging the ripeness of his parents' produce, and then the careful snipping of a stem or plucking of a fruit.

"You look less dead now," his mother pronounces over dinner one night. "Very good. You should visit us more often, Jaebeom-ah."

His father laughs: "I think we've harvested more in the past few days than normal. Even with his clumsy hands. To be young again!"

"You're still young," Jaebeom protests.

"Not as young as you," his mother says, and puts more young radish kimchi in his bowl.

Jaebeom shifts uncomfortably in his chair and crunches into the kimchi. He doesn't feel young any more, like this blow that he's managed to put out of his mind for a while has stripped something away from him.

"Young people bounce back more quickly," his father counters and stretches, groaning as his back clicks. "Ah, honestly. When are you going to give me that massage, Beom-ah?"

"Tonight, tonight," Jaebeom promises. "But, Appa, you know, if you come to Seoul —"

"Ah, when can we find the time, son?" His father sighs. "There is no real break from life out here, you know."

He's saved from having to answer when his mother asks, "When do you have to go back?"

Jaebeom looks at her. She's putting her chopsticks neatly across her empty bowl.

"Friday," he says, appetite abruptly diminishing. There's still rice left in his bowl, though. He takes a bite of a chunk of rice stained red with kimchi juice. "I ... Friday."

"Hmmm. That's a long holiday you've been given."

"Yeah," Jaebeom murmurs, and looks down. He can already feel what's coming, and it's making his stomach twist into knots.

He pours his soup onto his rice and forces it all down in one long gulp; when he looks up both his parents are giving him twin looks.

"Jaebeom-ah ... what is it? What happened?"

It's so weird, because he'd assumed someone from JYP would have called his parents to tell them before he went home. He wonders if Jinyoung has had to tell his parents himself too.

"They ..." he trails off, unsure of how to explain, when CEO-nim had been so vaguely open-ended about it all. A very weird combination of open-ended and final. "... we're being put on hiatus."

"Oh," his mother says. His father's still drinking his soup, though he does pause mid-gulp before continuing. "Well, what for?"

"I don't know."

"Didn't your CD do well? I saw in the newspapers that it sold quite well. We saw you on the TV."

"I don't know."

"Or, oh, did —"

Jaebeom blows out a breath, frustration rising all at once from where he thought it'd died. "I don't _know_, Eomma, I'd be the president of JYP if I did."

"Yah!" his father snaps, putting his bowl down. "Don't be rude!"

His mother looks more disappointed than anything. "You still have that temper, Beom-ah?"

Jaebeom deflates. "Yes."

"I have years of experience with it, but I hope your friends don't."

Jaebeom can't say anything to that, shame rapidly creeping hotly up his neck.

"Well," she says. "Silence isn't a good answer either. So what are they having you do next?"

Oh, for gods' sake. Jaebeom almost wishes he were back out in the fields with nothing but the wind and the clouds in the sky for company. And the plants. "I don't know either. They just ... told us and then we went back. To the dorm. And then came home. I guess they'll tell us when we're back. More training, probably."

His mother makes a face at that. Her next question takes Jaebeom aback: "How's Jinyoung doing?"

Jaebeom stares at her. "What?"

"Jinyoung," she repeats patiently. "How is he feeling? About all of this, you know."

"I ... don't know?" 

His dad grunts at that. "You haven't contacted him? Aren't you his leader?"

"I don't think we —" Jaebeom stops and looks at his dad. "JJ ... doesn't really exist any more." And oh, saying it aloud like this now feels momentous. Like it warrants more reaction than what his parents are giving him now.

What's even scarier is the way his mum is frowning now. "But aren't you friends?"

The snort comes out before Jaebeom can stop it. He wants to say he doesn't mean it, but also ... it's been very hard to feel like they possess anything more than that goddamn potential CEO-nim had talked about. Especially not with how they'd left things, before separating to go home.

"No?" She's frowning _even harder_. "Jinyoungie is a sweet boy."

"He is _not_," Jaebeom says reflexively, thinking of all their fights and tussles, the way Jinyoung goes straight for the jugular whenever he locates it.

"He seemed very sweet whenever we met," she says, and looks at his father. "Don't you think so?"

"I only met the boy once," he says. "Isn't he your dongsaeng?"

Jaebeom shrugs. "Kind of. With only two of us ... it's hard to explain."

"What's so hard to explain?" his father says. "You haven't checked on him since you received your news at all when you are responsible for him.”

"Ah, Jaebeom is sad too, come on," Jaebeom's mum starts to remonstrate on his behalf.

This is very, very familiar; Jaebeom is both shocked and not. And underneath it all, some sick feeling creeping into his gut. He has managed to not think of Jinyoung when he should have been in the past few days of working the land, and has been grateful for it.

"We gave you enough time to sleep all day in bed," Jaebeom's dad continues inexorably, "and to sort yourself out in the fields. Did you do any thinking at all?"

"Some," Jaebeom manages. "Um."

His mum cocks her head at him, bird-like. "Do you dislike him?"

"No!" This bursts out of Jaebeom without thought, so it must be true. "No, of course not, I don't. I don't hate Jinyoungie." He sighs and runs his hands through his hair, gripping hard. "I don't know, it's just weird. Between us now. Do we have to talk about this?"

"Is it only now?" His mum presses, ignoring him. "The weirdness? Or ..."

How can he explain Jinyoung and the weird way they've been thrown together, whether they like it or no, since they first met as strangers when they were fifteen? How can he explain the odd resentment that can grow, at being tied so specifically to someone just because of a turn of fate, even as they find their own friends? Or the constant curiosity, the way Jaebeom had privately thought hopeful things about fate until Jinyoung had first pouted and said one thing whilst meaning another. The way it had been easier for Jaebeom to go with other people instead, to not hurt his head trying to figure out this strange, strange boy.

And then the way JJ Project had forced all those things to come toa head; having to be leader and hyung all the time meant so little of Jaebeom was left over for himself. And Jinyoung had just _been there_, all the time, expectant and waiting and his eyes, always, so sharp behind the excitement or anger or moments of quiet in between. So sharp it always felt like his gaze was pinpricks all over Jaebeom's soul.

He remembers laughing with Jinyoung. Feeling uncomplicated delight and pleasure around him whenever they danced together or were joking around with the buffer of others. It's just that... there was so much else, too.

"Sometimes," Jaebeom settles on. "Sometimes."

"Hmm," his dad grumps. "Weird or not, he's younger than you. Didn't you take care of him properly?"

For once in his life, Jaebeom wants to say an age gap of less than a year doesn't matter.

"I — no," Jaebeom admits. "Probably not."

His father snorts. "I know we didn't give you any siblings, but I thought we raised you better than this."

And oh, that does sting. "Appa," he pleads. "I just ... don't know how to _treat him_. I don't know how to describe it - I've never met anyone like him before."

"You've known him for three years now, haven't you?"

"Yes! But it's not like he's the only other trainee! I can have other friends too!"

"Can't you just treat him like them?" His mother cuts in.

"I do! I did!"

"Would you not check in on your friends after such news has been delivered?"

Again, Jaebeom finds himself absolutely defenceless. Because he would, of course. He thinks. He doesn't know anymore. Maybe not if he and only one other person had received that news, no matter who that person was.

"You've avoided thinking about this enough, Jaebeom-ah," his father says, standing up. "And you've told us enough. I don't think you have acted the way a gentleman should. It's said, you know, that —"

Jaebeom tries his best not to make a face as he tunes out; they have apparently arrived at the point his father starts quoting Confucian scholars at him. He nods when it seems like proverbs have wound to a natural finish and says "Yes, I understand," whenever his father pauses to look at him.

"Well," concludes his father, "I hope you think about this and it helps you when you go back on Friday."

"Yes, Appa," Jaebeom says, and gets up to help with the dishes, grateful for the escape.

It is, however, not so much an escape as a trap.

"Ah, Jinyoungie mentioned having noonas before," his mother says when Jaebeom is scrubbing the jjigae pot he left soaking from lunch.

"He does," Jaebeom sighs. He's met them; they came up to visit once, during a break from university. It was just after they'd shot Dream High and had gone into high gear preparing for their debut. Jaebeom had stood, sweaty and panting and awkward, in the corner of their practice room whilst Jinyoung's older sisters had cooed over Jinyoung and told him he needed to shower before they took him out for dinner. "They're... nice?"

He continues, "They treated us to meat," when his mum hums encouragingly. "Both of us. And spoilt Jinyoung a lot. It was awkward. Strange."

What had really been strange was how Jinyoung had changed around his sisters; blossoming warm and soft. Excited; he'd been so excited, but different from how he usually buzzed around Jaebeom. He'd wondered why at the time — put it down to it being because they were his actual sisters, then.

She laughs. "I understand them. Jinyoungie is very cute, and they probably hadn't seen him in so long."

"They gave him a lot of attention," Jaebeom concludes, ignoring her comment about Jinyoung being cute. He was, Jaebeom couldn't deny it, but cute boys and girls were the basic currency of his world. "Ah, so he's probably fine now, right? Since he's at home with his family."

"Are _you_ fine now?" his mum asks sharply. "Or are you complaining about your parents?"

"What?" Jaebeom yelps. "No, no, I ... oh."

"Hmph," she says, and dries a bowl. "I feel sorry for Jinyoung."

"What about me?"

"You! We have given you a week. Now it is time to reflect."

Jaebeom groans.

"I think you already know," she says soberly, taking the last banchan plate from him, "some of what you have not done as you should."

He remains silent, stomach turning over.

*

The night before returning to Seoul, Jaebeom gets his notebook out for the first time since he came home.

_Jinyoung-ah, I’m sorry_, he scratches out. It's most important to articulate that outside his own head, somewhere. Even if no one will ever see it. He hasn't spoken to his parents about this since; they've said their piece, even if his dad has taken to leaving smudged and annotated copies of extracts from the Analects on his bed. They've been getting more pointed as each day passes, and as Jaebeom forces himself to think over the past

He’d sent Jinyoung a photograph of a bucket full of tomatoes, the day before. Hadn't thought about it too hard, or at all. He hadn’t known what to say then, still doesn't really know what he's going to say to Jinyoung when they see each other again.

But at least he knows that Jinyoung likes cherry tomatoes.

Even if Jinyoung didn't reply until this morning, with a picture of the shining sea. It looks nice. Peaceful. Something he hadn't noticed Jinyoung talking about less and less, until he went home to Jinhae for their reality show, and came back lighter, bubblier, easier to be around. Until his next mood swing hit.

One of the quotes his dad gives him isn't from Confucius; Jaebeom isn't sure if they got mixed up or if there's a greater metaphorical meaning here. It reminds Jaebeom that victory is only assured if a general knows his own army as well as the enemy's. Jaebeom's dad probably means it in the metaphorical way. Jinyoung isn’t the enemy; Jaebeom knows _that_ much.

_I hope_, Jaebeom forces the words out with some difficulty, trying to press his intention into a promise. _I know how to apologise to you properly one day_.


	3. 2013/2014

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a difficult but necessary conversation is had. one (1) of the many.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> playlist songs: Better Man/Heart Shaped Box/The Scientist/I Will Possess Your Heart
> 
> this is apparently a short one, because this entire first arc was supposed to be one! chapter! hahah! i hate myself.

* * *

_I think I got too used to you always being in my periphery, but now_ —

Jaebeom pauses, struggles for a moment. He thinks: abandonment, but is loathe to write it down, even in his private notebook. What's private, anyway, in a dorm now filled with four other people? He had been used to it just being the two of them, and then their "_potential_" really had been "redeployed".

_Now_, he continues, slowly, haltingly, _you’ve found other - better - people to orbit_

Because that's what it was. He's realised this too late. But now seeing Jinyoung around other people ... that's what it had been, and Jaebeom too self-absorbed to notice.

It's not, Jaebeom reflects, that Jackson and Mark and the rest haven't been around for a long time either. Bambam, small and quick and achingly adorable, has been at JYP almost as long as him and Jinyoung.

It’s not that Jinyoung had no other friends amongst the other trainees, nor that he didn’t have close friends of his own.

But it's an adjustment. It had just the two of them, in such intense proximity, for almost a full year. And now there are six of them, with what Jaebeom heard under-the-table from a senior manager was a possible seventh joining them soon. Another vocalist, in an already-crowded vocal line-up.

Jinyoung unfurls that bright warmth Jaebeom saw when they had been with his older sisters, and that Jaebeom recalls seeing in random glimpses from when they had been trainees, the first go around. They never really managed to talk properly, after coming back to Seoul. Not even in the dorm they'd been moved into, even though it wasn't a trainee dorm. That should've been their first clue about being reshuffled into this new group, really.

With more people, though, especially people as bright and sociable as Jackson and Bambam, they spend more time doing things _together_ in the living room in these few months than Jaebeom and Jinyoung had ever managed in their year on their own. It's watching Jinyoung around them, paying more attention to him than Jaebeom ever really did before, that has him wanting to turn his eyes away again.

> _There’s that movie we watched with the others on Sunday. I feel like one of those monsters in the mud-pit: some grunting, ugly thing clawing my way out of slime into the sunlight._
> 
> _They were jealous of the elves and humans and trees I think. Because no matter how they’re bred, they still can’t get too close to the sun. Not without hurting, the way I do._
> 
> _I think. I think if anything comes of this, even if we never manage to be friends (again?) At least I'll have some good songs out of this._

*

Debut is so close now; they are a full set of seven and Jaebeom is so _tired_.

The rest of them have gone out to get snacks after a full morning of practice, ahead of an afternoon of more practice and vocal checks for Youngjae and Yugyeom. Jaebeom's been ordered on vocal rest, because he's been yelling so much for them to _focus_ in practice. 

God, at least he and Jinyoung never had problems like this.

He knocks his head back against the wall and groans.

There's a soft laugh. Jaebeom's eyes shoot open; he'd thought he was alone.

"Ah, Jinyoung," he says, uncertain of whether he had the right to a diminutive. "You ... didn't go with them?"

Jinyoung shakes his head. "I wanted some ... peace."

They smile at each other in perfect mutual understanding for one precious moment, before Jinyoung looks away.

“Hyung,” Jinyoung says, voice light the way it was whenever he’s about to say something piercingly true but doesn’t want to overtly offend.

Jaebeom can feel his hackles go up in reflex. He forces them back down. “Yeah?”

“Are you ...” he hesitates, eyes downcast. “Are you scared, too?”

The reflexive, defensive scoff makes it way out before Jaebeom can force it down.

Panicking, he watches as Jinyoung hides a flinch, as Jinyoung’s face smooths over, a seamless mask sealing away his thoughts.

“N-no,” Jaebeom stutters, “wait, Jin-Jinyoung-ah.”

Jinyoung pauses in the middle of getting up and turns to look at him. His eyebrows are raised questioningly. It's more than Jaebeom had expected. He goes for the pure, unvarnished truth.

"Yes."

"... Yes?"

"Yes, I'm ... scared."

"Oh." Jinyoung's lips stay parted and he sits back down. His eyes are guarded, but at least he's still here. "What are you scared about?"

He wants to say, no you first, but ... Jinyoung is here. They're talking. Maybe this can be part of his apology.

"That ... we aren't prepared enough," Jaebeom says, closing his eyes again. "The stage is so complicated. We are ... more of us now. Bambam and Yugyeom are so _young_. Youngjae is so new. What if Mark falls?"

"He knows how to fall," Jinyoung murmurs. "I've seen him."

That makes Jaebeom laugh. So practical, Jinyoung.

"And you?"

"Me?" Jinyoung looks startled for a moment. "I don't ... " He bits his lip and looks away.

"You can tell me," Jaebeom says, doing his best to keep his voice quiet and even. He wants to reach out and tuck Jinyoung under his arm, the way he does with the maknae. The way he's done before. "Out of anyone here, I'd understand."

Jinyoung's laugh is dry and bitter and strikes Jaebeom to the marrow. He looks at Jinyoung's face, still so young and soft, so at odds with the sound he just made.

"You would, wouldn't you," Jinyoung says, and it isn't a question. "Just the two of us."

Silence stretches out between them; Jaebeom can't find words to say.

"I keep asking myself," Jinyoung murmurs, staring at their reflections in the mirror. "What if they take it all away again?"

"We did well, didn't we?" he asks, before Jaebeom can come up with a response that isn't "I don't know" or "I try not to think about that".

There's a rawness in Jinyoung’s eyes when he turns to hold Jaebeom's gaze. It's not like anything Jaebeom has ever seen from him before, and it shakes him. "Hyung?"

"I thought so," Jaebeom says slowly. He can't bring himself to look away, no matter how disconcerting he finds the way Jinyoung is looking at him. "I thought so too. Despite ... everything else. We did well."

"So," Jinyoung says, and his voice trembles. His gaze drops, as does his voice, to a whisper. "What's to stop them from doing that to us again? To the rest?"

"Us," Jaebeom blurts out mindlessly, not knowing where he's going with this, but needing to say something, anything. "We know how this works, now. We have the rest. We won't ..." he hesitates. "We know what not to do."

_He_ knows, in any case, what mistakes not to make again. The Jaebeom of not even a year ago seems like a lifetime ago, and yet still too terrifyingly close, barely subcutaneous.

Jinyoung sucks in a quick breath, holds it, and lets it out slowly.

"I guess," he says, and then abruptly gets up. "I — thank you for sharing. Hyung."

Taken aback, Jaebeom gapes up at him. "You're ... welcome?"

"I need the bathroom," Jinyoung says, turning on his heel.

"Sure," Jaebeom says, bewildered, "but, Jinyoung —"

"I'll be back soon."

He really should, Jaebeom thinks as Jinyoung strides off across the room, get used to seeing Jinyoung's back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: a conflict-avoidant person who hates talking about gnarly feelings
> 
> also me: writes a thing that is All Of These Things.
> 
> anyway! kudos, [retweet](https://twitter.com/forochel/status/1190121167962738689), talk to me.


	4. 2014/2015

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> stuff starts happening. things start getting better! emotional epiphan(ies) are had!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> playlist songs: Heart Shaped Box/The Scientist/I Will Possess Your Heart
> 
> I am Tired. and reading through this for a formatting edit has been an exercise in "what fucking headspace was i in for All This Melodrama".

* * *

“Jaebeom-sshi! You guys are up in ten!” A production assistant who’d recognised him from the JJP era shouts, poking their head into the green room and spotting him first.

Jaebeom’s head snaps up, startled out of the fugue state his mind seems to settle into whenever he doesn’t have to be _on_ in front of the cameras. It’s either that or this obsessive, self-flaying effort to dissect his feelings, so strong they feel physiological.

He is currently dogpiled under the maknae, each cuddlier than the last, letting their easy affection warm him through. He’s had to train himself into not flinching, pushing firmly down on the reflexive instinct to push them away.

As he looks up, he catches Jinyoung’s gaze from across the room. Jinyoung’s round eyes are narrowed, and that dark gaze sharpens briefly, a complex series of emotions flickering across that pretty face. It makes the embers that are constantly on the brink of flaring up in his gut, burn a little harsher.

Then Jinyoung looks swiftly away, turns his attention to Jackson. But the sensation of that burn remains in Jaebeom’s gut, has his smile stiffening on his face.

*

> _This feeling — it burns me up from the inside, _he dashes off in between pre-recording takes._ Someone tell me what it is. I’m doing what I should have done before so why — **why.** Why does it feel like I’m still doing something wrong._

*

The thing is, Jinyoung’s eyes on him are always in some way _expectant_. His worse instincts tell him that it’s a challenge, a dare, a _come on, show them who you really are_. Either that, or he isn’t looking at all. It rankles, of course it does, when Jaebeom is trying so painfully to remake himself. To rise from the ashes of his mistakes.

He doesn’t deserve any faith from those quarters, of course, but it’s still the sand in the sole of his soul. Grit that doesn’t help with the friction of Jaebeom trying so goddamn hard to draw the mantle of leadership over his shoulders.

So: Jinyoung’s gaze flays his back as he hisses in a breath, desperately holding on to the tattered ends of his tether, and says to the maknae, who have gone _one step too far_, “That’s enough, guys, yeah?”

Yugyeom blinks at him, and in that moment Jaebeom knows he’s going to lose it.

“Can’t we just have _some fun_ —” Yugyeom starts rebelliously, Bambam small and equally defiant next to him.

Jaebeom regrets it even while letting go of the end of his tether as he starts shouting. It’s not like he feels good when he’s letting it all out, getting up in the face of a mere _baby_, and then Jackson’s when _he_ tries to intervene. It’s just this sick, twisty feeling of self-destruction, being carried along by the narrative current of a play that he set in motion without even knowing.

_Someone stop me_, he thinks desperately, but there are no managers in the practice room with them, and no one has gone to get them. Jinyoung’s still sat against the wall behind him, watching carefully, Youngjae tucked next to him. Mark-hyung is circling, reluctant to intervene when their age difference is still a tricky rock they’re learning to navigate around.

The fight abruptly ends when Yugyeom starts crying properly, fat tears streaking down his red, round cheeks, and his arms wound around his middle.

The words die in Jaebeom’s throat; he has frozen in place.

“Hey,” Jinyoung’s voice finally makes an appearance, but he isn’t speaking to Jaebeom. “Hey, Yugyeom-ah, don’t cry, come here.” He gives Jaebeom an unreadable look over his shoulder as he leads Yugyeom over to the wall, Bambam following after like a very ruffled duckling. The vicious look that _Bambam_ gives Jaebeom is clear as day.

“Hyung,” Jackson says seriously, the light-hearted prankster entirely gone. “Dude, that was ...”

Jaebeom isn’t quite ready to hear it yet. But he hasn’t felt ready for anything in a long, long time. He takes a deep breath in, the way Nickhun-hyung told him to the last time they talked about leadership and self-management, and pushes it all the way out, emptying his lungs along with all the dark emotions. Theoretically, anyway.

Mark is still hovering nearby, tight-lipped. He has a temper to rival Jaebeom’s own, a fuse longer but more combustible.

“I’ll apologise to Yugyeom later...” Jaebeom glances over at where Jinyoung has rather comically folded their tall maknae into his narrow embrace. It startles Jaebeom eternally to see Jinyoung this soft and warm, when previously he’d only ever really experienced false-ringing exuberance or brattish passive-aggression. For the most part. It has been so long since they were first thrown together as trainees.

“And the rest of us?” Jackson asks, voice even. He isn’t budging at all. Jaebeom is distantly grateful for this, for how much Jackson is willing to push. Even if right now it’s making it harder for Jaebeom as he struggles to pull his composure back together. The flipside of the honour of leading a team, Jaebeom keeps realising over and over, is feeling a bit like that giant in the collection of Greek myths he’s been reading.

Jaebeom sighs. He can’t exactly say to Jackson’s face that he’ll apologise to _him_ later.

“Hyung,” Youngjae pipes up from next to them. “Is practice...?”

Jaebeom hadn’t even noticed his approach. Over his head, he catches Jinyoung’s steady regard even as his hand passes soothingly over Yugyeom’s back, over and over. Bambam’s head is bent to Yugyeom’s, whispering something. They both look so small.

“Practice?” he echoes blankly. Shaking himself, he focuses on Youngjae proper. “Oh, yeah. No, it’s ... we’ll start again tomorrow. It’s late. Go home, guys.”

“Aren’t you going home too?” Mark asks at last, having closed in.

“No, no. I’m going to the studio first.”

“Really?” Jackson says, looking unimpressed. He may be shorter than Jaebeom, but his presence is outsized. A compact dynamo. Not a _threat_ anywhere but in Jaebeom’s own head, but sometimes — he hisses in a breath, trying to ride the crest of his surging irritation.

“Jackson.” Mark puts a hand on his elbow and his metaphorical foot down. “Leave it.” There’s something a little like sympathy in his eyes when he looks at Jaebeom. “Practice was already becoming a lost cause before, anyway.”

Somehow, that is even harder to bear than Jackson’s judgement or Jinyoung’s even gaze. Jaebeom looks aside and shakes his head. “I —”

“See you at home, Jaebeom-ah,” Mark says, and pulls Jackson along with him, Youngjae at their heels and glancing uncertainly back at Jaebeom. “Come on guys, let’s take the bus back.”

*

If it was late when Jaebeom called practice off, then it is past late by the time he lets himself into his room.

He isn’t expecting to see anyone other than Nora; Youngjae had been dogpiled with Yugyeom and Bambam in their shared room when Jaebeom quietly slid their door open to check on them. It’s still a little foreign to him, how so very casually tactile they are.

Jinyoung’s sitting on his bed, hands twisted together, hesitant.

“If you’re here to scold me ...” Jaebeom hears himself saying as he closes the door behind him.

Jinyoung flicks a look up at him. A sneer half-forms on his face before it falls apart.

“No,” Jinyoung says quietly, and he picks at the weave of the blanket draped across the foot of the bed. Youngjae steals blankets, so they need a village’s worth of blankets between the two of them. “I just thought, if you wanted to. If you needed someone to vent to.”

It takes every last bit of energy Jaebeom can scrape together to stop himself from gaping unattractively.

“Don’t you blame me too?” he says at last, dropping his backpack onto the floor and stripping off his hoodie.

He hears Jinyoung sigh, even as the thick black material of his hoodie obscures his sight.

“Hyung, don’t start playing the blame game when you don’t want to.” Jinyoung sounds worn out. More worn out than this admittedly long day warrants.

Jaebeom finally manages to pop his head out of the hoodie and lets it fall onto his backpack, toeing off his socks as he goes to fetch his pyjamas.

“I’m going to wash up,” he says, doing his best to soften his voice. “Stay if you want.”

He tries to think of what to say while showering and brushing his teeth, but his brain is just stuck on a continuous loop of _Jinyoung is talking to me?_ It is only as he’s walking back to his room, towel slung over his damp hair, that the thought strikes him suddenly: what if Jinyoung didn’t stay?

A sour feeling turns his stomach, something he doesn’t want to examine too closely.

The sliding doors are flimsy and have already been warped from running bodies banging carelessly into them, so Jaebeom knocks his forehead against the wall instead. Once, twice, before sliding his door open.

He catches Jinyoung mid-yawn, rubbing his eyes sleepily, squashing a particularly fluffy blanket to his chest. “A-ah, hyung,” says Jinyoung. “Sorry, I —”

“It’s late,” Jaebeom says gruffly, kneeing up onto the bed. “You shouldn’t have stayed up.”

Jinyoung makes a noise a lot like a disgruntled cat. There is an echoing noise from the nest of blankets belonging to Nora in a corner of the room. Jaebeom can't quite hide a smile.

“But,” Jaebeom essays, fluffing up a pillow, "thank you, anyway.”

“Do you not want to talk about it?” Jinyoung asks. Out of the corner of Jaebeom’s eye, he can see Jinyoung’s fingers nervously rubbing against the grain of the fleece blanket wadded up in his lap.

Jaebeom sighs and lies down, flinging a forearm over his eyes. It’s easier like this, when he can’t see anything. The world, whittled down to sound and sensation: Jinyoung’s careful breathing next to him; the coolness of the pillowcase under his head; the ticking of the big clock in the living room, futilely set five minutes fast.

“What’s there to say?” Jaebeom says at last, into the expectant silence. “I lost my temper again. Yugyeom and Youngjae are scared of me. Bambam is angry with me. Jackson thinks I’m an idiot.” He forges on, over Jinyoung’s nascent protest: “Mark had to try to be a hyung. And you ...”

“I...?”

Jaebeom blanks. He doesn’t know. He’d thought Jinyoung didn’t have time for him anymore. But here Jinyoung is, struggling to stay up so that Jaebeom has someone to talk to.

“What about me, hyung?” Jinyoung prompts, a strange note in his voice. Gods, he is as incomprehensible as ever.

“I don’t know.” Jaebeom lets his arm fall to the mattress but keeps his eyes closed. It’s safer like this, when he can’t see the expression on Jinyoung’s face. “I guess you’re disappointed in me, as always.”

He hears a sharp intake of breath, before the mattress dips closer to thim. “_Hyung_.”

“I don’t blame you,” Jaebeom says, drunk on this confessional haze that’s taken him. “How can I?”

There’s a damning pause from Jinyoung, enough for Jaebeom to open his eyes.

Oh, shit, there are tears in Jinyoung’s eyes. This is the _second_ person he’s made cry in the span of twenty-four hours. Jaebeom struggles onto his elbows in alarm.

“No,” Jinyoung says low, his voice quavering. “What do you mean — always?”

Jaebeom stares at him. “I just thought, you know. With JJ and ... everything.”

“I wasn’t —” Jinyoung dashes the tears away. “That time was ... hard. But I wasn’t disappointed with _you_.”

“I don’t mean just the way things ended,” Jaebeom says. He’s half wondering if this is just a dream; if he’s just fallen asleep in his studio and his subconscious is telling him that he should be talking to Jinyoung. But no, it would never be this hard if he were dreaming.

Jinyoung looks at him for a long while, eyes still red and wet. “What are you saying, hyung?”

And isn’t that just the question? What the fuck _is_ Jaebeom trying to say here?

He stares helplessly at Jinyoung; it’s not like he’s telepathic, and it’s not like he can ask Jinyoung to please hold for two months while Jaebeom continues getting his shit together and maybe presses this maelstrom of feelings into the lyrics and sounds of a song.

“I just ... wasn’t a very good hyung for you, was I?”

Teardrops cling to Jinyoung’s long lashes as he blinks slowly. Abruptly, Jaebeom realises that he can tell that Jinyoung is searching for words. He laughs, a dry humourless thing. “You don’t have to disagree with me, Jinyoung-ah.”

“You’re better now,” Jinyoung whispers, eyes downcast. His fringe, usually swept up when they’re working, is soft over his forehead and long enough to shadow his eyes. “You’re good with the maknae.”

“Am I?”

Jinyoung looks up. There’s a firm set to his mouth and a fierceness in his gaze, despite the sheen of fresh tears. God, Jaebeom would give almost anything to know where are these tears are coming from. “Yes, honestly. Yugyeom will forgive you and Bambam will get over it after tonight. They were being really annoying and they know it.”

It is _the worst_ idea, but Jaebeom really badly wants to ask Jinyoung if he knows how annoying _he_ had been, sometimes, during their short-lived JJ Project days. When they’d been thrown together, over and over again, when they had been trainees. The first time round.

Jaebeom groans instead. “I just ... want to know how to stop them without yelling.”

One naturally curled corner of Jinyoung’s lips curls further and he snickers softly. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Maybe just mild maiming,” Jaebeom jokes tentatively.

“Just don’t aim for their faces.” Jinyoung seems like he’s going to say something else, but then an enormous yawn overtakes his face.

When he checks his phone, the bottom of his stomach drops out; it’s almost two in the morning, and they have a six thirty wake-up call.

“Fuck, Jinyoung-ah, we should go to sleep.”

Jinyoung frowns at him around his incessant yawns. It makes _Jaebeom_ yawn too, and they spend the next minute caught in a feedback loop of yawns, only broken when Jinyoung starts giggling through them, laughing in a carefree way he hasn’t around Jaebeom in such a long time it makes Jaebeom ache to think about it. Gods, the things he destroys without thinking.

Some instinct drives him to say, “Sleep here tonight — you don’t want to wake up the maknae, right?”

He panics right after, because they only have _one bed_, and despite everything, he and Jinyoung have never slept together a whole night through on a bed before. It seems, somehow, qualitatively very different from cuddling with Youngjae.

Even silly with sleep, Jinyoung’s perceptiveness musn’t be dulled any, because he’s putting aside the blanket and sliding off the bed. “It’s fine, hyung, I’ll be very quiet. You should try having a bed to yourself for one night.”

Jaebeom opens his mouth.

“Goodnight, hyung,” Jinyoung murmurs, sliding the door open quietly. “I hope you feel better.”

“I — yeah, uh. Thank you, Jinyoung-ah. You too.”

It’s only when the door snicks shut on Jinyoung’s wry little smile that Jaebeom realises that Jinyoung never really answered his question, about their time together as JJ Project.

*

Something shifts, after that.

It's easier. Everything is easier, despite the ongoing challenge of learning what leadership means. Despite the difficulty of applying theory to the reality of six rambunctious, headstrong people whose thoughts are sometimes entirely incomprehensible to Jaebeom.

It's easier now, when Jinyoung's eyes are less cool when they rest on him, his gaze now less a challenge and more a reassurance. Easier when Jinyoung's presence comes back into Jaebeom's orbit; its previous absence all the more obvious now. Easier when Jinyoung's there, always ready to play the sounding board when Jaebeom's so frustrated he wants to tear his hair out, or so anxious the words have to be said to someone not his journal.

Careful coldness melts in increments marked by his eyes cutting to Jaebeom in the midst of bubbling laughter, a certain warmth in Jinyoung's voice, the return of some physical ease. A press of the arm here, a restraining hand to the crook of Jaebeom's elbow there, collapsing into the hidden space between Jaebeom and the back of a chair. Jaebeom does his best to earn these things, so cautiously doled out by Jinyoung. Except the last perhaps: it doesn't count when Jinyoung is so ill he physically can't hold himself upright in front of the cameras, probably.

But he can't protest, not even when Jinyoung wraps himself merrily around the others and divebombs Jackson, yelling all the while. His father has always told him that there nothing is so sweet as that earned by hard work; that sweetness is sharpened when preceded by bitterness.

He tries, though. The first time he diverts a conversation back to Jinyoung himself, tries to draw some true, real things out of Jinyoung, the raw look of surprise on Jinyoung's face cuts deep. It's quickly, if imperfectly hidden.

So even Jinyoung's insecurities feel like a gift, the first time that they are haltingly whispered, in the cool dark of his closet of a room, huddled under blankets commandeered off Jaebeom's bed. They never address their past head-on, but Jinyoung worries about his voice developing; worries about how well he is performing his image; worries about his parents; worries about whether their foreign members feel lonely the way he did when he'd first left home for far away Seoul.

And then it seems like the ice breaks up, all at once, in one great give.

*

> _Farmers fear the thaw after a long winter. Now I understand why. You sweep me away, Jinyoung-ah, just like floodwaters. Flooding happens two ways: when the river swells, bursts its banks and the levees break. That happened one year when we were kids. Lost the early crop. The other way is when the groundwater creeps higher and higher over the years, slowly, slowly. Until the earth itself is shifting under your feet._
> 
> _It feels like that with you sometimes. All the time. You are all the ways in which water works. The slow, creeping rise and the sudden whelm. The wear in the stone and the warmth of the womb. The gentle brook and the rushing rapids._
> 
> _... Honestly, why did you feel the need to show me the rip in that goddamn sweater noona put you in today? I keep thinking and trying to remember what we were like. Not even three years ago. But it feels like it has been an eternity since. A whole lifetime ago._
> 
> _I don't know why you decided to wait for me that night, last summer. I don't know what I've done to deserve your patience. I know exactly what I've done not to deserve it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, a person who tried arguing back after like ten years of Not, and then gave up halfway through the pseudo-argument because I Got Too Sad & Tired: attempts writing an argument-filled situation. pls forgive. (and tell me what you think) (and [retweet](https://twitter.com/forochel/status/1190788015309897728)).


	5. 2015/2016

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jinyoung finishes going through puberty. jaebeom is just going through It, as the youth say. more epiphanies are had. jaebeom is a strugglebus who makes questionable life decisions. emotional growth is not linear, folx!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6HCEOAqY5a9J5S0BXvOIoY?si=u7d4yKwVSPaXur-vTKR_6g) songs: [The Scientist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-RcX5DS5A)/[I Will Possess Your Heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq-yP7mb8UE)/[Shoulda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u92iz1pfcnQ)/[Tell Me You Love Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM1w9PEQOE8)/[All Apologies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmkuH1k7uA)
> 
> i wrote a bit of this while watching one of the early real got7s and yelling at bysine/twitter/my corkboard about jinyoung's ineffable twinkiness. my corkboard, mind you, yelled back at me about insurance, bills, tax paperwork and other exhausting #adulting things. 
> 
> also at some point while writing part of this chapter i remembered this was supposed to be a companion fic to metathesis. retrofitting shit to something you wrote with about 25% of the understanding and knowledge of the characters you have now is ... A Whole Thing.

* * *

"It's fine, singing's the most important thing for GOT7 anyway," Jinyoung tells him, in that newly low, smoky voice that Jaebeom still has yet to get used to.

Contrary to Jinyoung's fears, his voice breaking has been anything but a death knell for his musical future. It seems a little, too, that now the long-awaited milestone has come and passed, Jinyoung has also mostly settled into his skin. He's a calming presence to be around now, for the most part. Like sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long day.

And now: his voice and his intervention — now growing bolder and in frequency — are like a balm to Jaebeom's stinging pride. The half step he took turns his back to the camera and conveniently eclipses Youngjae and his mischievous mockery from Jaebeom's view for a moment. Jinyoung smiles expectantly at Jaebeom, aegyo-sal wrinkling into existence.

What can Jaebeom do but smile in response, move in for the low-five, and turn back to the camera to continue his public humiliation.

Barely a minute later, as Jinyoung is bodily holding him back from maiming Youngjae, Jaebeom flashes abruptly back to being eighteen again, humiliated, and his simmering frustration with the boy currently throwing all his weight into keeping Jaebeom in place.

"I was told to!" Youngjae is protesting loudly and sincerely, pointing at Jackson, even though those fucking words came out of his fucking deceptively innocent face. "I just did what I was told!"

Notably, Jinyoung does not make much of an effort to prevent Jaebeom from murdering Jackson later on.

Even more notably, Jinyoung unplugs the punch machine with a distinct look of exasperation on his face in the middle of it running up the numbers after Bambam's birthday punch. It's smoothed away by the time he turns around to tip the camera a wink.

But it does lodge in Jaebeom's mind, some thought percolating as they go through the surprise cake ceremony. Jinyoung's face in stillness is all angles now, Jaebeom realises with a start as he holds the cake atop the box steady while Jinyoung picks out candles. He can almost see the adult Jinyoung will grow into in the planes of his face.

So disturbed is Jaebeom by this that he frees up a hand to pluck a candle from the cake and taste the glob of icing it carries away.

"_Yah_," Jinyoung murmurs without looking up.

Jaebeom laughs quietly and puts the candle down to help with removing the rest of all eighteen candles that have been sacrificed to Bambam's birthday.

Ah, Bambam: the boy is standing in between them, one hand steadying the cake and the other hovering awkwardly mid-air. He's babbling something for the cameras about not expecting this surprise when Jinyoung, without a twitch in his expression, quickly swipes a finger through the icing and smears it onto Bambam's cheek.

Both the look on Bambam's face and the way Jinyoung's mask has broken into gleeful mischief startle a laugh out of Jaebeom. This seems to encourage Jinyoung more; he swipes more icing on Bambam's face before taking off into a victory circuit. It is a comfort of some kind to know that the brat Jaebeom had been so fractiously acquainted with years ago is still in there, just beneath the surface.

*

And so time passes in a whirl of studio recordings, promotions, lessons, fanmeetings, neverending practice, filming reality and variety — on and on and on.

Time passes, marked by the steady onslaught of Jinyoung's growing affections, the return of his playfully brattish teasing. The latter seems gentler, warmer, this time round, however; Jaebeom doesn't know if it's because of some internal shift in his perception, or if there really is a qualitative difference to the cant of Jinyoung's head and the way his eyes go wide and round in anticipation.

As to the former: Jaebeom doesn't know how he's managed it, but every press of Jinyoung's cheek to his shoulder; every sweetly crinkled smile or smoky laugh he earns; every hug bestowed upon him; every time Jinyoung's eyes meet his, unshuttered and easily fond, makes the tangled knot of regret and longing wound up tight under his ribs for what has seemed forever ease a little more.

A different dorm, but the same setting: late nights, Jinyoung's dark room, appropriated blankets like hoods over their heads.

"Hyung," Jinyoung whispers on one of these nights, after a full day of vocal lessons and dance practice and meetings. He doesn't live in a glorified closet off the maknae’s room anymore, but some habits die hard. "We're going on tour. A real tour."

His delight emerges in a chirrup of laughter, a hand quickly clapped over his mouth muffling it.

Jaebeom wants to tell him not to, but can't quite find the words to explain how it sours the pit of his stomach whenever he sees Jinyoung hiding his mirth.

"Yeah," Jaebeom says. He laughs too. "World tour. What I would give to —" he stops, abruptly. Uncertain.

"To?" Jinyoung asks, shuffling closer to peer at him.

"...to go back in time and tell us that we're going on a world tour," Jaebeom says. He looks down at the valley that his blanket dips into between his knees. Picks at a fraying thread. For all that they've talked about their worries for the future, their concerns about the present, their past is the one topic that he and Jinyoung seem to have silently, mutually agreed to avoid.

And now Jaebeom's gone and blown it all.

"Oh." Jinyoung's voice sounds small.

Jaebeom rubs at his chest absently, looking up to try and perceive Jinyoung's face through the gloom.

"I wouldn't have believed it."

"Even from an older me?"

Jinyoung snorts, glasses gleaming as the light from his reading lamp flashes off them when he tilts his head. He's silent for a while, looking at Jaebeom. Then he shakes his head, hair rustling against his blanket. "Different timelines, maybe. There's no guarantee what would happen. Especially if you go back and accidentally _change the past_."

That's not what he was going to say originally; Jaebeom is certain of this. But he lets it go, because ... it's still tender and raw to think about, those early years between them.

"You read that book I told you about, didn't you?" Jaebeom asks flatly instead.

He's rewarded with another chuff of laughter. "How did you guess?"

"I don't know," he deadpans, "I must be a genius."

"You're a _something_." Jinyoung murmurs playfully, and pushes him so that he almost tumbles off Jinyoung's narrow bed.

They move onto other topics after that: the imminent departure of one of their longest-serving staff members; whether or not any of the boys would ever eat a vegetable; the ideal frequency at which the fridge should be cleaned (Jinyoung's blank stare had been all the reply Jaebeom needed); the growing tension between Bambam and Youngjae, and what to do about it.

Jaebeom is endlessly grateful for the space Jinyoung has made for him, and the time Jinyoung gives to him. For the counsel that Jinyoung provides without stint, when Jaebeom leans on his ability to read a room.

But it's not like they've stopped fighting altogether.

There are still too many things lain unsaid, too many rough edges where sparks still fly and — sometimes, given the correct conditions, catch.

*

> _I can't stand it when you slam a door in my face. Maybe it's because it feels like - regression. Like that door is going to remain shut, permanently. And I know what that feels like, now. We've grown up a lot since 2012. Remember how we used to fight? Back then you just shut down, and I couldn't help but wonder if you learnt that because of me._
> 
> _It seems like I only took good things from you and you got the worse end of the deal, huh. I'm sorry, I'm sorry - I could say it a thousand times and it wouldn't be enough._
> 
> _You’d probably laugh at me if you knew about Mark and I having it out and crying at each other like babies. Or do you already know? Mark might’ve told you. Like calls to like, after all; and you and Mark are very much alike. Whereas we are like water and oil._
> 
> _I hate fighting with you now. I hated it then, too. It feels like I’m fighting a war but I only can see out of one eye and don’t know anything about your - your supply trains or weapons or troops. I don’t know why we’re even having a fight when we do. Should I be glad you’ve started fighting back again? You hold so much of me now that you could carve out my liver with your sharp tongue. It’s too late to take it back. Have you always been this easy to talk to, Jinyoungie? Is this growth? I don’t know._
> 
> _I do know this: I want to know you more, all the time. A little more, a little more. And — I know what that means._
> 
> _I know it’s too late, and it burns. There’s that song you like so much — let’s take it back to the start. So let's, but do better this time. I’ll do better this time, I swear._

*

Jaebeom’s problem is that he can never find a balance. He oscillates: gives too little, then overcompensates; tilts too far one way and almost trips over his own feet when he leans too far in the other.

He’s at least been working on reducing the amplitude of his oscillations, on letting the others help to even his keel. But he can’t help it when Jinyoung cuts his feet out from under him just by existing, and in the same breath catches him with those elegantly competent fingers.

And then there’s the fucking girl group covers, and the irretrievable thought Jaebeom had during dress fittings, the private articulation of desire he’d never dared to name even alone with his thoughts: _I want to feel Jinyoungie_.

... and underscoring it all, of course, the steady, despairing beat of his emotional epiphany. The jury is honestly still out on training emotional awareness into himself, if this is where that gets Jaebeom.

Praise more, he’s read. Positive reinforcement. And all along this sick guilt that’s settled like silt into the bed of his soul.

There is also the sweet, sick gratification he feels when he’s high on pain medication for his slipped disc, alone in the dorm with just his thoughts and worries after Sungjin's come and gone from his impromptu, stolen visit to make sure Jaebeom hasn't died, and his phone is inundated with individual messages from Jackson about how Jinyoung is getting increasingly frazzled. Mark sends him a single photo of Jinyoung looking on the brink of murder, Yugyeom and Bambam looking legitimately terrified in the corner of the photograph and captions it with a shrug emoji. Youngjae, at 2.14am, sends a 'pls come back soon leader-hyung-nim'.

_How terrible is it_, he asks Jinyoung right after reading Youngjae’s message. _Tell it to me plainly._

_Tell your back to feel better soon, hyung._ Appended to the message is a sticker of a stick figure lying in a pool of bloody tears.

Grinning to himself, almost forgetting about the radial ache in his lower back, Jaebeom sends back a laughing sticker.

And then he almost drops his phone into the unnavigable abyss of the gap between his bed and bedside-table when Jinyoung’s reply arrives: it’s a selfie of him pulling the most impressively unimpressed pout Jaebeom has ever seen on any human being in his life.

_Very healing. I’m going to sleep now,_ Jaebeom types carefully. _You should too._

He receives no reply, and doesn’t get to sleep for another hour.

Maybe that’s why — all of these things are why — he insists in Hong Kong, despite Jackson trying to deflect, on _his_ truth. That while Mark and Bambam are skinnier and have more feminine features, some strange alchemy happens when the stylists put Jinyoung in a wig and curl his eyelashes, zip him into a tight dress, when Jinyoung spins around and the hem lifts, flirts at thighs Jaebeom’s seen bared no more or less provocatively a thousand times in loose shorts.

He can’t get Jinyoung’s shocked laugh out of his mind, the surprised pleasure on his face before he gathered it back in. The way he glowed quietly next to Jackson for the rest of that stupid interview while Jaebeom was busy kicking himself inside.

“Dude.” Jackson pulls him aside after their raft of pressers, brow furrowed and leaning into the depth of his voice enough that Jaebeom bites back the automatic ‘that’s _hyung_ to you’. “What was that? Did you have to say all that, even after I tried to help you?”

“I said you looked good too,” Jaebeom says stiffly, wrenching his arm out of Jackson’s grip.

“_Hyung_,” Jackson sighs. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Just — think about the members, please.”

Jaebeom twitches. “I don’t think they felt particularly left out.”

“Okay. Okay.” Jackson blew out a shaky breath. “Think about _one very particular member_ that you _kept talking about_. And how he’d feel.”

It’s probably a sign that Jackson and Jinyoung are spending too much time together if Jackson were talking in circles to Jaebeom.

“He seemed pretty happy,” Jaebeom says, frustrated with this conversation already.

“Oh my god, I give up,” Jackson says in English. Jaebeom understands _that much_. He switches back to Korean: “Hyung, please _stop stringing Jinyoungie along_.”

*

He doesn’t believe it, so he starts paying more attention. Attention accretes into hyperawareness that has him trying to drown it all out with music, late nights in the studio, sinking into the escape of books. It doesn’t really work, because Jinyoung is in every line that he scratches out; in the melodies he plonks out on the keyboard; in the marginalia he scribbles into his books.

Realisation hits in October, concomitant with the turning of the seasons, leaves shading to red and gold, nights snapping cold. They’re styled with more layers now, the noonas overjoyed at having more to work with.

“I feel like I’m modelling for a wedding boutique,” he hears Jinyoung tell Mark, his husky voice illogically cutting through the constant background din of the dressing room. “They want to give me a _boutonniere_.

What’s been heard cannot be unheard.

It doesn’t help that Jinyoung has been warming even more in counterpoint to the cooling of the weather. He’s all cuddles, lately; crinkly smiles and soft eyes that pierce through the core of Jaebeom’s longing. But that’s just another facet of Jinyoung, the light of his attention falling on Jaebeom for however long he may bask there.

Still, Jaebeom cannot help but keep noticing that Jinyoung looks every inch a prince-groom; that his blazer is a peach-tinted ivory that matches Jaebeom’s own coat; that Jinyoung’s mood today is indulgently affectionate; that he keeps orbiting insistently around Jaebeom like the past four years have never happened.

Still, Jaebeom cannot help but sink into it. Can’t help but lean into the arm Jinyoung has around him; lean into the warmth of his body and the press of his cheek against Jaebeom’s hair. Can’t help but smile, a little giddy with this indulgence, when Jinyoung shapes a heart with his hands, back to the audience. He knows — he thinks that Jinyoung is doing it for the fanservice, but it feels so close to what has been haunting his desires that ... he gives in, tired and worn out from the yearning.

Still, Jaebeom cannot help but go along with Jackson’s exuberant prodding, cannot help but notice Jinyoung looking away in his periphery, when he croons _little more, little more, I want you baby_, cannot help but see the way Jinyoung’s fingers nervously fiddle with the wristband someone gave him.

This should be some sort of triumphant moment, even despite Jackson’s exaggeratedly awful falsetto. Instead, Jaebeom’s heart seizes in a terrible, wonderful mixture of hope and despair.

He loves this song, he does. He might even have written it thinking of the boy perched on the long table next to him, the boy who's clasping one wrist with the other hand now, a nervous tic he has yet to control. The boy who might, impossibly, amazingly, heart-joltingly, possibly want him back too.

But the rising screams from their fans, the excited, exultant, hungry looks on their faces are a bracing bucket of cold water over his head. Here is the reality of their entangled existences, caught between public and private.

Jaebeom abruptly wishes, letting his high note fade away, that he were alone in this.

For Jinyoung's sake.

Only one of them should have to deal with this.

*

> _This is just one more unspoken secret we share._
> 
> _I’m sorry, Jinyoung-ah. All I have for you are apologies, it seems._
> 
> _I think I have to break your heart one more time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so here ends the first emotional arc of this goddamn fic that I originally planned as a one shot, then 3 chapters, and now ... this. I'm poking at arc 2 in a very desultory fashion (it's about 9k long and hopefully two thirds written. hope springs eternal? I realise this is not very long in this bewildering era of increasingly enormous fics but ... it's a lot to this humble one). 
> 
> anyway. do the "writers are poor creatures who feed off encouragement" thing, please and thank you. shout-out to jayofdiamonds, who has left PHENOMENAL comments that make me very, very happy. ([retweet here](https://twitter.com/forochel/status/1192979147397709824))


	6. late 2016/early 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jaebeom makes some very questionable life decisions. it's angst o'clock! everyone! EVERYONE!!! deals with the fall out of them. be less of a feral youth, my dude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6HCEOAqY5a9J5S0BXvOIoY?si=MRxLeM9yS4-I3q_MDSaqZQ) songs for this chapter: [andrew belle's make it without you ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TICJw1NEWaM) & jb's very own [fade away](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izycOciZ1EY)
> 
> to quote a bysine comment on my gdoc: jbs tired dot com. _i_ am tired dot com.
> 
> anyway. this is the nadir! I'm not sure if I need to warn for stuff because I don't want to spoil anything so. *handwaves* let me know if you were particularly emotionally traumatised. **there is nothing in here that would warrant putting up Archive warnings.** otoh: jaebeom's cats cameo :3?

* * *

They are alone in the living room.

It has been months since it's been just the two of them, sharing a space. It has been months, since that fateful fansign.

Jaebeom has dragged himself home after pulling an overnight in the studio and Jinyoung is leaving for a full day of filming. Days that stretch for more than twenty-four hours.

Dim, early winter light seeps in around the borders of the dark curtains, drawn shut; it dilutes the gloom of the living room just enough to wash Jinyoung out. Undoubtedly Jaebeom looks about as terrible himself. Worse. He's in need of a shower and at least twenty-four hours of sleep, and will only get one of these things.

"Ah," he says, "Jinyoung...ie." Pauses awkwardly and _hates_ that things have become so awkward, yet again. "Morning."

"Good morning, hyung," Jinyoung returns, and finishes winding his scarf around his neck again. His hands froze mid-motion earlier, when Jaebeom stepped into the living room, his eyes going wide nothing so much like a deer in headlights. Sleep-deprived as Jaebeom is, he doesn't miss the way Jinyoung's gaze flicks assessingly over his face and bare neck.

"I -- I was in the studio," Jaebeom scratches the back of his neck. "It's not ..."

Jinyoung's face goes tight. "You should -- ” Jinyoung stops and swallows hard. He’s looking down at his feet. “No, not ‘should’, I’m not telling you what to do.” So careful and deliberate it makes Jaebeom ache: these deep visceral pangs under his sternum. “Just ... be careful, hyung. For, um, for ... her sake too.”

There are so many things he could say, chief among which would be denial. He could say careful about what? For who? He really only had been working in the studio. And then he'd see Jinyoung’s carefully stitched together calm unravel a little, maybe. But Jinyoung's fingers are almost white where they’re gripping his other wrist.

Jaebeom wants to reach out and uncurl them. He doesn’t have the right to.

“The ban hasn't been lifted just yet,” Jinyoung continues. His dark lashes are long against his cheeks, wan and pale. Jaebeom notes, with a pang, the deep shadows staining hollows under his eyes. “And you’re ...” he visibly gropes for words, but Jaebeom is wordless. What can he offer Jinyoung, really?

“You’re our leader,” Jinyoung concludes, eyes flicking up momentarily.

They’re glassy.

Jinyoung flinches at whatever is on Jaebeom’s face and turns to go.

It occurs to Jaebeom that in trying not to rock the boat, he’s smashed a hole into its hull instead. This metaphor is going nowhere fast, just like this conversation.

“Jinyoungie..” his voice is an almost noiseless rasp, a kind of formless plea he can only press into the shape of this well-worn dimunitive. It’s never made Jinyoung’s shoulders hitch up like that before, not even when they were eighteen. His back looks lonely and fragile under his jacket. Jinyoung has never looked so breakable before, not even when he did actually fracture his foot.

“I have to go now,” Jinyoung says, without looking back. “I have filming.”

He leaves Jaebeom feeling distinctly unmoored, standing alone in the middle of their living room.

Youngjae drifts in at some point, yawning loudly, Coco making little doggie snores in his arms. Their entrance rouses Jaebeom a little, from the stupor he’d fallen into.

“Hyung,” he says, pointing at Jaebeom’s phone, buzzing where he'd dropped it on the sofa at some point. “Your phone. It’s, uh. You know.” Youngjae labours under the delusion that their employer has installed audio bugs in the walls. He’s got Yugyeom and Bambam half-convinced, except that the terrible twosome have taken to the hidden-in-plain-sight tactic of living under surveillance.

“Oh,” Jaebeom says listlessly, picking it up to see a series of texts from the non-celebrity he met through one of his producer hyungs — god, what is he doing? Is this really the kind of asshole he wants to be? What would his father say?

He stops that train of thought in his tracks, because — well, his parents knowing about the broad strokes of this clusterfuck he’s got himself into would be bad enough, but the specifics? Of _Jinyoung_?

No, no, no.

*

Jaebeom thinks better in music, sometimes: in the snatches of melody, tone impressions of musical ideas, a particular sound that he hears in his head and then has to spend hours teasing out of his synthesiser programme. The chords come to him for this one, first: when he's lying on his back in bed, vaguely comforted by the vigorously purring bundles of fur who've arranged themselves around his body in an array designed for maximal heat retention. Strummed on an acoustic guitar, perhaps, in melancholy minor.

The cats bat at him in disgust when he dislodges them, sitting up to retrieve his laptop, the mini-keyboard on his floor.

"Sorry, sorry," he mutters in response to the chorus of disgruntled meows, running a hand over Kunta's soft torso when he's set his laptop down. "Appa has an idea, okay?"

With a little more grumbling, they settle down again around his new configuration. He _thinks_ they like listening to him sing. They definitely like lying on his chest when he hums.

So Jaebeom hums, half reclined on his pillows so that at least two and a half cats can weigh down his ribs, settle warm and comfortable on his belly; hums it over the chord progression that he plays around with syncopating, adds pedal effects to. Tries to pour, the way he feels like his mind is being drawn and quartered, like his heart is splintering as he's trying to do the right thing but fucking up anyway into the notes; leans into the rougher, lower end of his vocal register when he tries out what he thinks could be a chorus. Something confessional, conversation-like, maybe.

He can almost hear what it should be like, in the end: alternating texture density. Something to mirror the way he feels hollowed out one moment and filled to the brim with a tangled snarl the next. Something to capture the way he's feeling right now, like a candle guttering in the wind, wishing he could just dissipate nothing so much like smoke into the air.

He keeps it as quiet as he can; it's late, and the walls in their dorm aren't very thick.

*

Another late night, trying to keep up an appropriately supportive and engaged text conversation. He's carrying a pot of ramyeon back to his room when he hears from the end of the corridor that leads to the living room:

“Do you even know what is real anymore, hyung?”

“...of course I do. But I can’t —” that’s Jinyoung, the crack in his voice devastating.

“It scares me, hyung. The way you smile now.”

Jaebeom pauses. That’s Bambam, who usually hates showing his soft underbelly.

“Don’t be,” Jinyoung says.

"It’s not right.” Bambam sounds indignant. “Just because — and to flaunt —”

There’s a long, low sigh. “I appreciate —”

A stamp of a foot against the ground, a wet laugh, silence for a while.

Jaebeom is about to move away when he hears: “I can introduce you ...” and his jaw clenches against his will.

“Leave it alone, Bam-ah.”

“Don’t you want —?”

There's a burst of shocked laughter: Jinyoung's. There's only one other person that Jaebeom knows who laughs like that, and the two of them are like peas in a pod anyway. “You are a terrible child." Jinyoung’s voice is dry as a desert, shot through with fondness. "And ... no. Not ... no."

“You don’t have to be in —”

He’s interrupted by Jinyoung. “That’s not really how I work. But I know —” the tiniest hitch in Jinyoung's breath feels like a knife through Jaebeom's lungs, popping alveoli and stealing his breath. But this is a self-inflicted wound. “— I know that’s not how other people work.”

Bambam’s mutter is angry and inaudible.

“Don’t curse our leader’s relationship, Bam,” Jinyoung sounds distantly amused, in the way he tends to detach part of himself in self-defence. “He —” the humour is gone now, his voice a soft, tender bruise that makes Jaebeom’s own bones ache in sympathy. “He deserves happiness, no matter what.”

Jaebeom walks as noiselessly as he can away. The dorm is small, but he can go back and eat in the kitchen.

*

There is a detente, after Jaebeom quietly ends things.

It hadn't been too hard, or ugly; they'd only been seeing each other for a month or two, after all. And he's always so busy and unavailable it didn't really matter, in the end, according to her. Maybe Jaebeom's just a walking cautionary tale.

He doesn’t say a word, but somehow -- the dorm itself seems to breathe easier. Jackson warms up again. Bambam stops unsubtly trying to make his life a living hell. Mark stops giving him judgmental looks and Yugyeom stops giving him torn, injured ones. Youngjae's the only one who's pretended neutrality throughout, though he has let Jinyoung cuddle him more.

And Jinyoung ... Jinyoung thaws; he always thaws, much, much faster than would be wise. Jaebeom doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge. Can’t make sense of it.

The members seem to be following Jinyoung's cues, in any case.

It certainly helps with the camaraderie they're expected to project during the American leg of their fanmeet tour. Without the strain, it's much easier to fall back into the rhythms of their loud, tumultuous group dynamic, to have fun on stage and off.

It also helps with alleviating the madness of preparing for a new album while on the go, trying to complete demos with the limited equipment available to him: his laptop, his mini-synthesiser, his notebook. But Jaebeom still misses his studio, misses the familiarity of it, the dim cocoon shrouding him from the pressing concerns of the outside world for however long he had to lose himself in his music.

It's hard to steal even a moment for himself in the relentless march of touring: the eschereque cycle of sound checks, rehearsals, performances, post-performance debriefs, vlives; the sheer exhaustion of non-stop travel dragging him to sleep when he could be picking away at harmonies instead; labouring under the panopticon of public opinion they're constantly dogged by.

The song that he's working on is a utopian escape from all this and the emotional wear of navigating the wreck he's made of the relationship he and Jinyoung managed to build from the ruins of their false start, with no one to blame but himself. A whimsical, happier supposition of what might have been, or what could be, if Jaebeom weren't such a fucking mess. If they were different people with different lives, perhaps: living in a different world with different obligations to fulfil.

Jinyoung doesn't seem to blame him; if anything, he seems to think that Jaebeom's sad because of his break-up.

He is all indulgent smiles and warm eyes one moment, leaning in to nudge him playfully in the side or touch a hand to his knee, sometimes forgetting himself enough to go in for a full hug, to roughhouse with Jaebeom the way that they haven't in _months_ — then something will pull up short in him the next; the warm, knowing laughter in his eyes will freeze and fade; he'll cling unnecessarily to someone else; he'll spend a whole day avoiding Jaebeom.

The thing is, Jaebeom can't exactly fault him, can he?

But he’s still so frazzled after a month of this push-pull that — he makes an error of judgement.

He takes a risk, assumes that nobody outside of the fans who'd come to their fanmeet in somewhere as large and uncaring as Texas would know him. Especially without stage makeup or costuming.

"Are you crazy?" Jackson hisses out of the corner of his mouth when they're waiting for the lift the next morning, carry-on bags at their feet.

Jaebeom blinks blearily at him, the beginnings of alarm starting to ping in the back of his brain.

"You seriously took —" Jackson cuts himself off when they're joined by an extremely stubbly and grumpily yawning Youngjae, who isn't bothering to cover his gaping maw at all.

They both hang back when Youngjae slouches off towards the knot of staff waiting for them near a cluster of armchairs fenced in by potted palm trees.

Jaebeom mutters hoarsely, his brain having started grinding into gear again during their descent, "Did you hear ... does anyone else know?"

"I hope not," Jackson says darkly, eyes scanning the lobby from behind his shades. "The managers sure don't. You're lucky none of them were on our floor. You're lucky you got a corner room."

"Lucky," Jaebeom echoes, before snorting. He's capable of calculated decisions too, despite the messes he seems to keep tangling himself in.

The way that Jackson's head whips around in his direction makes Jaebeom flinch.

"Seriously? Wow, Jaebeom, you ..."

Jaebeom drags his hands down his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, and groans.

He's treated to some silence for a bit, before Jackson expels a long, low breath, and slings an arm around his shoulders. "Hyung, you're just not feeling very well now, are you?"

"I feel like shit," Jaebeom says bluntly, even as he lets Jackson shuffle them in the general direction of their staff.

"Well," Jackson says philosophically, because he is very terribly a morning person. "There's only one thing to do about that, right?"

Despite himself, Jaebeom asks, "What?"

He doesn't get an answer because the staff perform a very contained implosion when they arrive. Someone shoves a mask in his direction, and their head stylist asks him where his sunglasses are. In the background, one manager-hyung is complaining to the other at length about how long the group check-out is taking, and yet another one is loudly demanding to know where Yugyeom is.

"Here!" comes Yugyeom's high, indignant voice. "I've been here all along!"

Jaebeom absently wonders where Jinyoung is, and starts trying to do a headcount. His mind is so fuzzy from sleep deprivation that he keeps losing count at three, though.

"Ah, sorry, Yugyeom-ah," says the manager-hyung in question. "Come on, time to board the van before we all _miss the flight_."

Jaebeom stumps sleepily after them, still half in a daze while the other half is already starting to bitterly regret his calculated decision the night before.

It's as they're waiting their turn to climb into the van that Jackson leans in and hisses, "Be less shitty, that's the answer."

Easier said than done so soon, because when Bambam climbs into the van after him and squeezes his way into the back seat that Yugyeom has staked out for him, his eyes widen.

His lips purse and then his eyebrows furrow, as he abruptly changes directions to collaspse into the seat next to Jaebeom, making a series of complicated hand signals in Yugyeom's direction like they're ninjas or something.

"Hyung," he hisses, and pokes at Jaebeom's neck with zero sense of self-preservation. "What the fuck?"

Jaebeom yelps — that hurt way too much for a mere poke, even with Bambam's stick fingers. Clapping a hand to his neck, a vague sense impression from the night before of the lady he snuck into his room being particularly bitey surfaces. He grimaces.

"Oh my god," Bambam continues in that low hiss, eyes much wider than they normally would be at this hour. "Hyung, oh my god!"

He scrambles around in his carry-on bag for concealer, but it's too late, because Mark's climbing in and raising an eyebrow at Jaebeom holding his neck. Similarly shocked understanding dawns in the slow creep of his other eyebrow up to meet the first.

Mark's frozen with indecision, clearly wondering how to get past this point, when Jinyoung's hoarse morning voice complains from behind him, "You're blocking the way, Mark-hyung."

"Ah, uh," stutters Mark, before he pushes Bambam _onto_ Jaebeom.

Bambam flails a little, before going abruptly limp and closing his eyes, letting out the fakest little snore on earth.

In any other situation, this would be ridiculously funny.

As it is, Jaebeom merely feels terrified.

Mark lowers himself into the seat across from Jaebeom and Bambam, letting Jinyoung climb in after him.

"Yah," Jinyoung is grumbling, "what on earth was taking so long?"

From the coveted shotgun seat, Youngjae lets out a snorting, wheezing snore.

And then he sees Bambam pretending to sleep on Jaebeom.

Jinyoung's face goes on an entire journey, but it is very early, and Jaebeom thanks the Goddess of Mercy from the bottom of his undeserving heart when Jinyoung follows Yugyeom's grabby hands and cute whine to "Sit with us, hyungie," backed up by Jackson's dirge-like ostinato of "Wang gae! Park gae!" with an incredulous huff.

"You guys are so weird this morning," he says, "I'm going back to sleep."

The team's attempts at diversion can only do so much, especially since there's no way Bambam has acquired the skill of stealth-applying concealer without drawing the attentions of both Jinyoung and their manager.

It never ceases to amaze Jaebeom how their fans can find it in themselves to swarm airports even at such unfriendly hours as this, and it's also making him particularly nervous on this morning. He buries his chin into his hoodie a little more, hunching his shoulders inwards as he shuffles along the pathway that's been carved out for them to ticketing, and thence to customs.

So absorbed is Jaebeom in trying to curl away from the omnipresent eyes of the world that he startles when he hears Jinyoung's voice in his ear, both too close and not enough: "Are you sleep-walking?"

The amusement in Jinyoung's voice tugs at the yearning in Jaebeom and heightens the yawning dread opening up a pit in the bottom of his stomach, like the sick anticipation before a rollercoaster drop.

"No," Jaebeom mumbles, squeezing his eyes shut hard enough to see static.

"And now you're sleep-talking too," Jinyoung laughs quietly, touching an unobstrusive hand to his waist.

Jaebeom feels more than sees Jinyoung move away, the warmth of his presence a sudden loss that is both a relief and ache.

"You do look very tired," rumbles the security-hyung who has been strategically placing his wide torso between Jaebeom and the cameraphones pointed eagerly in his direction. Preserving whatever idol image Jaebeom has left; it's not like this isn't his image, in some ways.

In response, Jaebeom yawns behind a hand and lets hyung push him none-too-gently along to the blessed peace and privacy of the VIP departure lounge.

"We're not doing this for _you_," Yugyeom informs him when they're queuing to fill their water bottles -- even VIPs had to wait at the water dispenser by themselves in Texas, apparently. His voice is about as venomous as it's possible for Yugyeom to sound.

Jaebeom sighs and scratches at his chin. "I know, Yugyeom-ah."

"Well!" Yugyeom huffs, and turns away, arms folded. "Good!"

Then he turns abruptly back and in a demonstration of how he could never be a ninja in a million years, clumsily slips Bambam's concealer into Jaebeom's hoodie pocket. "There, go to the bathroom. I'll fill your bottle for you."

The thing is, Jaebeom is _so close_ to successfully completing this group effort (he'll have to put a pin in the emerging realisation that everyone knows and apparently are ... are _something_ not-negative for future overthinking) towards ... sparing Jinyoung's feelings.

He's striding towards the bathrooms on the other side of the VIP lounge from the water dispensers, concealer clutched grimly within his hoodie pocket, when -- in the mirror running the length of the unmanned wet bar, right behind the shelves of liquer -- he spots Jinyoung staring at him from across the way, eyes blown wide over the mask that he has on.

"Ah," Jaebeom says to himself, "fuck."

It’s a good thing his expressive mouth is hidden under a mask, because even at this distance, even reflected in a mirror: in Jinyoung's eyes are a deep, vast ocean -- and all its waters now are in wild commotion, great waves beating against the banks of his self-restraint.

Caught mid-step, Jaebeom feels like his ribs are collapsing in on themselves. He wants so desperately to reach out -- goes so far as to start turning on his heel, to redirect himself.

He sees Jinyoung's expression shatter briefly, some terrible dark thing that echoes the caving in of Jaebeom's chest, before his face is pulling itself back together.

Jaebeom's overbalancing and tripping over himself. Jinyoung's face in the distance is already seamed over, closed off, a lake still and placid and devastatingly beautiful in its remoteness.

*

> _I did that to you._
> 
> _Why don't you do the same thing, Jinyoungie. Go find other boys to kiss, or girls if you want. I promise I won't look; I won't know. I don’t wanna know. I swear it. You should be happy. You deserve better than me. Be angry._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ............things will start getting better from the next chapter on. I SWEAR. 
> 
> and again: if this made you feel a ling please hit the kudos button, LEAVE A COMMENT!! TELL ME ABOUT THESE LINGS YOU FEEL, and [retweet](https://twitter.com/forochel/status/1198079468969041920)! feed me, readers. <3 thank.


	7. Feb/Mar 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jaebeom Grovels. things mend slowly but surely. featuring a mini cooking tutorial and a few delightful* cameos
> 
> *this is subjective

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> playlist songs: [You Calling My Name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQI9oZEY-B0) / [Church from FOB](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3vbvF8bQfI) / [Never Be The Same from Camilla Cabello, who pains me every day with her apparent str8ness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph54wQG8ynk) / [Love Like You from ... Rebecca Sugar/the Steven Universe soundtrack bc THESE LYRICS UGH](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kdxUY9_vns)
> 
> GOT7 dropped their newest EP and I was like wow JB did you just hack my gdocs.
> 
> alsowik: you can ABSOLUTELY TELL that i was getting deep into day6 whilst finishing this!
> 
> alsoalsowik: there is a limit to how much #research i am willing to do w/o getting paid for it, which includes taking EXTENSIVE NOTES whilst watching hongkira. the limit is finding out the real names of jb's producer hyungs. so I made shit up!

* * *

"What," Mark says with all the leverage that being older gives him, "the hell is _wrong_ with you?"

Mark's cornered Jaebeom in his studio, which he's been barricading himself into during the short break they've been given to recover from jetlag before rehearsals for the Jamsil fanmeeting kick into high gear.

Jaebeom sighs long and hard, pulling his headphones off his neck and down onto the table.

"Everything?"

"Don't give me that bullshit," snaps Mark. "You're just lucky Wonpilie is buried in the basement so you get me. And not him. Trying to claw your eyes out."

Jaebeom flinches. Wonpil has the long, strong fingers of a pianist and the protective, blind loyalty to Jinyoung to go with it.

He pushes his fringe back off his face in frustration, grips tight at the gathered handful of hair. "How do I even make it up?"

Mark's silent for a moment. "I'd tell you to talk to him," he says frankly. "But God knows neither of you will come out and address this ... _thing_ directly."

"Do you talk to Jinyoungie like this?"

Mark chuffs out a laugh. He opens a can of cola with a hissing pop. "Would _you_ talk to Jinyoungie about his feelings like this? No, wait, don't answer that question, I forgot you guys don't talk about your feelings."

Stung, Jaebeom sits up, legs falling to the floor with a thump. "We do! Just not — not."

"Yep." Mark takes a smug sip. "Not."

"Words wouldn't help, anyway," Jaebeom says, giving up on trying to get Mark to go away or talk about something else.

"No, but they wouldn't hurt," says Mark.

"I did try," confesses Jaebeom.

He had — when they'd got back from LA. He'd tried apologising, and got as far as the first syllable of Jinyoung's name before Jinyoung had snapped, "It's none of my business," and had barely caught himself before slamming his bedroom door, snicking it firmly shut instead.

"Wow," Bambam had said very drily and unhelpfully from behind him.

"Maybe try going more than a month without fucking someone," Mark says in the present, also very drily and unhelpfully.

"I didn't even fuck —" Jaebeom sputters, "— _you_ hardly have any room to —!"

"I," Mark loftily says from the heights of Planet Stealth Casanova, "am not emotionally involved with anyone."

"We're not —"

"Please," Mark interrupts, "spare me."

Jaebeom subsides in despair.

"I'm going home to nap," Mark announces after they've both sat in silence for a while, Jaebeom stewing whilst Mark finished his cola. "You ... meditate or something."

Jaebeom doesn't meditate, but he does stare at the wall very hard whilst reflecting on his wrongs. Jaebeom's dad would approve at least, even if the only thing that Jaebeom really gets out of this is a tension headache and resolution to be a monk forever, or at least until he earns Jinyoung's forgiveness and they dimension travel into a different world where none of anything exists.

So: a monk forever.

But Mark has a point: their anniversary fanmeeting is in five days, because flying back always made them lose a day, and with Jinyoung basically a ghost in the dormitory whenever Jaebeom made it home, the fans were bound to notice if something was off between them.

Even Jinyoung, ever the consummate actor, wouldn't be able to paper over his hurts well enough, this time round.

Jaebeom groans and slumps over, forehead knocking against the hard wood of his work table.

"Careful, Jaebeom-ah," says Kyungil-hyung from behind him, "you need those brain cells."

Too tired to even be shocked, Jaebeom grinds his forehead a little further into the wood, turning his face to the side just enough to say, "Do I, though, hyung?"

"Yes. Time is money, you know, and we have shit to work on."

Jaebeom sighs long and low, dragging himself upright. Kyungil-hyung's put his guitar case down on the coffee table, narrow avoiding the empty can that Mark left behind, and is unzipping it.

"Yes, Jomal — how the fuck do I even pronounce that?"

"Follow your heart," says Kyungil-hyung in that specific tone of shit-eating faux-wisdom, "and it will lead you true."

Jaebeom groans and makes contact with his table again. "Right."

What Jaebeom appreciates about spending time with his producer hyungs, really, is that they don't make him _talk_. Though the quality of this silence seems a little anticipatory, like Kyungil-hyung is waiting for him to break.

He listens to Kyungil-hyung run through a quick series of warmups, then the sharp slap of a string against the fingerboard startles Jaebeom out of the daze he's fallen into.

"What's up, Jaebeom-ah?"

"Huh?" Jaebeom blinks blearily as he sits up again and swipes his laptop back awake.

"You're going to be useless until you sleep or ... get whatever it is off your chest."

"I don't want to talk about it, hyung. Look, can I play you this idea I had?"

That gets him a long look, but at least a nod so that Jaebeom can hit play and they can listen to the snippet he thought of on the plane back and has spent most of his time hiding away trying to build up texturally.

"It's nice," Kyungil-hyung says. "Dreamy. A bit sad." And then he raises an eyebrow.

Jaebeom groans, deeply and very heartfelt. "_Hyung_."

"What?"

"Ugh." Giving up, Jaebeom puts his face back down on the table and says into the cold, unfeeling surface of it, "How do you ... say sorry to someone about something you can't really talk about?"

There's an even longer silence this time, more uncomfortable than the first.

Kyungil-hyung's guitar is gently placed with a soft _tap_ onto the coffee table, cloth whispers, and a throat is cleared.

"Well," Kyungil-hyung says, "I've always made dinner for my girlfriend when I fuck up."

"Hyung." Jaebeom sits up in deep horror. "Hyung, _you can't cook_."

"It's, uh, the effort. And it's amazing the kind of pre-packed stuff you can get at Lotte Mart."

It's only after he's excused himself half an hour of trying to write music later to go to the local grocery store, that Jaebeom realises what conclusions hyung had leapt to.

_I don't! Have! A! Girlfriend!!!_ he sends frantically, standing in the middle of the produce aisle.

An ajumma jostles past him with an irritated grumble. She bustles off too fast for Jaebeom to apologise, so he's left feeling even more off-kilter from faint shame and embarrassment as he picks over the squashes stacked together.

Jaebeom is trying to remember if they have enough kimchi in the dorm fridge when his phone chirps.

_I know lol_, is all Kyungil-hyung has to say for himself.

"Fuck you," he mutters sotto voce to his phone, and then freezes up, glancing about for anyone who might've overheard.

Luck is on his side, this time; the coast is clear.

He's made it smoothly into the checkout queue when his phone chirps again.

This time, it's Jackson, asking where he is.

_the mart_

_oh good are you cooking? Jinyoungie is WASTING AWAY in his room._

_????_

_like no one has seen him come out to eat, and you know how he sleeps._

Jaebeom feels his heart flip over and the hollow in his stomach expand a little more. It's worse, this time. You're his leader and you aren't doing your job, his father says to him from 2013. Everything aside, Jaebeom hasn't grown much at all, it seems. Two steps forward, one step back.

_i'm cooking_ is all he can think to send back to Jackson.

The nice thing about shopping in the ajumma-run neighbourhood grocery store is that they only really recognise him as the nice young man who comes in semi-regularly to buy produce, and heartily approve of him being able to cook.

"Ah, I haven't seen you in a long time," the cashier says cheerfully in that distinctively throaty voice that all halmeoni seem to develop naturally.

"Yes, sorry," says Jaebeom, digging around his backpack for his wallet, "I've been overseas a lot lately."

"For work?" she coos, weighing the _hobak_. "Ah, you work so hard ... we have some strength teas on sale, would you like some?"

"Oh, uh," Jaebeom stammers, "uh."

He eventually manages to make his escape with his groceries and a sample sachet of tea powder, and gets home and into the kitchen blissfully uninterrupted.

The smell of frying kimchi draws Bambam into the kitchen.

"Wow," he drawls in that sing-song way of his, "is this a Jaebeom hyung I see?"

Jaebeom flicks him an annoyed look. "Who else here knows how to cook?"

"But why are you cooking in the middle of the afternoon?"

Poking at the kimchi, sizzling in the pot, Jaebeom evasively says, "Jackson texted me about Jinyoungie wasting away in his room."

Bambam thumps his forehead very gently against the fridge door. "Are you making jjigae?"

"Yes."

"Is that the only thing you know how to make?"

Just as he's about to snap at Bambam for being rude, Jaebeom almost drops the bamboo chopsticks. "Ah, fuck." He moves the pan off the fire and puts a pot of water on to boil.

"Hyung?" Bambam asks, sounding a little alarmed, taking one step forward.

"I can't make jjigae!"

"But you can?"

"No, I mean," Jaebeom bangs the cupboard doors open desperately, "I mean Jinyoungie likes Western stuff more! Fuck!"

Bambam's "oh my _god_" goes mostly unnoticed as Jaebeom rampages through the cupboards.

He finally locates a box of pasta Mark bought from the fancy Western supermarket near the JYP building. Deciding that it's better to ask forgiveness later, he unwedges it from where it was stuck in a corner behind several bulk packs of ramyeon and Jackson's organic seven grain rice mix.

Jaebeom pauses and pulls out his phone to look for a recipe to follow. He doesn't make pasta often enough to know exactly what to do, and he wants this to be _good_.

"Seriously?" he asks, squinting as he pours the rest the pasta into the boiling water and salts the water belatedly. Jaebeom's seen people do this. "Save pasta water to use at the end?"

"It's for thickening," Bambam says. He's evidently decided to stay and spectate. "At the end. Though my mum just uses cornstarch and water."

"Weird," says Jaebeom, but who is he to judge this food blogger? At least the recipe seemed fast.

The panful of kimchi goes back on a hob and starts sizzling again as Jaebeom slices through pork belly strips quickly, eliciting a —

"Wow, hyung, you really went all out, didn't you?"

"It was on offer," Jaebeom says absently, sliding the meat off the chopping board into the pan. The fat immediately sizzles and pops, loud and mildly alarming. He turns the heat down a little and stirs the pasta, watching the red oily residue on his chopsticks slide off into the water. It shouldn't matter, anyway, right? Since it was all going into the same dish.

The eyeroll is irksomely obvious in Bambam's tone when he says, "And they say romance is dead."

Tossing the frying kimchi and pork belly a little higher than needed, Jaebeom says forcefully, "Don't say weird things. I'm just trying to make him eat."

Bambam walks out of the kitchen.

Jaebeom blinks, shrugs, and starts separating eggs. He really hopes these yolks don't curdle when he mixes it into the pasta; the recipe had a giant red warning around those words: BE CAREFUL NOT TO LET THE YOLK CURDLE.

He's carefully mixing the pasta noodles into the pork-and-kimchi mixture, adding in spoons of pasta water like the recipe said to when things get too sticky, when Youngjae walks in this time and stops in his tracks, eyes wide.

"Hyung! I'm hungry!" he declares, advancing upon the very delicate operation that Jaebeom is about to perform with the noodles and the egg mix.

Jaebeom sticks an elbow out. "Not yours!"

"It's for Jinyoungie-hyung," Bambam whispers from the doorway; he's apparently got over whatever it was that made him flounce out.

Youngjae freezes midstep, and reroutes to the fridge. "Oh! Never mind!"

Honestly, Jaebeom would ... say something, but he's mixing the yolks in now and praying to every single deity out there that this works, and that's taking up all of his concentration.

"Huh," Bambam says, hovering over his shoulder and contributing precisely nothing to the effort. "Not bad, hyung. I'd hire you to work in my mum's restaurant."

Egg yolk mixture effectively mixed in without turning into scrambled eggs, Jaebeom lets out a long, relieved sigh and cracks his back. Then he unwraps the block of fancy parmesan stolen from Jackson's stockpile and grates it uncertainly and haphazardly into the pan.

"Fancy," Bambam comments.

"You can have the rest if Jinyoungie doesn't want it," Jaebeom says, pulling down a bowl from the dishware cabinet and filling it with pasta.

Without waiting for a response, he puts it on a wooden tray together with a pair of chopsticks, and marches off grimly to Jinyoung's room.

Never has a door looked so intimidating before.

To be fair, never has Jaebeom fucked up with Jinyoung quite _this_ much before.

He sighs and knocks his forehead against the door, leaves it rest there as he calls out, "Jinyoung-ah?"

There's a dull thump, but not loud enough for it to be a body hitting the floor, and then rustling noises. Silence, swelling and sullen, follows.

"Have you eaten yet? I made food."

The thing about where Jinyoung's room is located is that everyone in the living room, who are currently Mark and two thirds of the maknae line, can see him doing this.

After another few interminable seconds of silence, Jaebeom decides to fuck it; he's just going to go in.

The door is, surprisingly and to his relief, unlocked.

It is not as bad as he'd feared when Jackson had sent his melodramatic message — the curtains are drawn and Jinyoung's windows are cracked open, fresh wintry air seeping in through the tiny gap.

Actually, it's kind of chilly in here.

"Aren't you cold?" Jaebeom asks, picking his way across Jinyoung's floor, strewn with clothes and books and a stray soft toy, to put his tray down on Jinyoung's desk.

Jinyoung rustles under the duvet that he's wrapped himself in, impressively fluffy bedhead sticking out the hole in his cocoon. He looks so cute, and so grumpy, and like he's contemplating being rude.

"No," is all that he says, before he turns his face away. "Is that ... pasta?"

"Kimchi samgyeopsal ... carbonara?" Jaebeom sounds out carefully. "I found a recipe online."

The silence that falls this time _itches_. Jaebeom fidgets where he stands, feeling all of seventeen and tongue-tied in the face of Jinyoung suddenly using his pout on him again. Except he can't even see what Jinyoung's doing with his face this time.

"You don't like Western food," Jinyoung says tentatively, but he's inching off his bed.

Jaebeom shuffles his feet and rubs at the back of his neck. This all seems so clumsily obvious, in retrospect. "No," he agrees, "but you do."

That does get him a look, a quick turn of Jinyoung's head so he catches the still-soft curve of his cheek and the twist of his plush mouth. He's fully risen now, duvet abandoned, and is wearing an oversized hoodie that probably belonged to Jaebeom at some point and basketball shorts.

"Thank you," Jinyoung murmurs, slipping past him to sit in his chair in front of the tray, sleeve whispering against Jaebeom's chest, "for cooking."

Feeling at loose ends and not wanting to just stand there and watch Jinyoung eat like a creep, Jaebeom starts picking up the detritus on the floor.

"Hyung," Jinyoung says, "this is really good."

"Ah," Jaebeom pauses in the middle of picking up a pair of jeans that Jinyoung probably has already forgotten that he owns to look at him. His back is still turned, his head bent to the plate. Awkwardly, Jaebeom stammers, "I -- I'm glad you like it."

For some reason, that makes Jinyoung sigh. His shoulders go tense under the enveloping, thick cotton of Jaebeom's old hoodie. It's excruciating, the same kind of pain he'd felt when he'd overheard Bambam talking to Jinyoung about hooking up with some random — but that's what Jaebeom thinks would be fair anyway, right?

"You're good at this, chef-nim," Jinyoung says, voice light in contrast to the tightness in his shoulders. He even turns around, smiling a little. If not for the careful, tense way he's holding himself, the upcurl of his lips would absolutely fool Jaebeom.

Jaebeom smiles weakly back and tosses the jeans in his hands into the laundry basket wedged in between Jinyoung's dresser and a floor-length mirror.

"What are you doing?" The words come out half-masticated.

When Jaebeom looks up from trying to sweep stray socks into a bundle with a t-shirt, Jinyoung's swivelled around in his chair, having pulled his legs up to perch cross-legged, tray resting on his knees.

Finally getting the last sock that he can see into the bundle without actually touching it, Jaebeom says, "Tidying up. You'll slip and break your neck on something one day."

Jinyoung chews obnoxiously at him.

If this were, oh, not even half a year ago, Jaebeom would chew back or say something about how even death wouldn't save him from the contract they were all bound to.

Right now, though, Jaebeom is caught in a bind, between falling into this brief moment of levity and the distinct feeling that he ought still to tread carefully.

"Hyung ..." Jinyoung says after a silence that has spooled out into awkwardness, Jaebeom stacking the books on Jinyoung's floor up neatly against the walls. He really needed a proper bookshelf; the both of them did. "You don't have to do this..."

"There are empty snack bags under your _bed_," Jaebeom hisses, entirely forgetting for a few seconds why he's doing this. "Pass me your rubbish bin."

A moment of stillness descends, and Jaebeom tenses up, brain catching up to his mouth. Then Jinyoung's chair is squeaking over the parquet flooring, and the bin thumps down next to him.

And so Jaebeom goes about his business whilst Jinyoung curls up in his chair an arm's length away, tapping away at his phone.

"Wow," Mark says when Jaebeom leaves Jinyoung's room with an empty bowl and a rubbish bag filled to the brim. "You're really grovelling, aren't you?"

"This is so weird," Bambam says, flopping down next to Mark. "How can all this be happening when they don't even _talk about it_."

"Like," Bambam continues as though Jaebeom isn't right here, burning up with embarrassment, as though a year ago Jaebeom wouldn't have already put a furious stop to the proceedings. "Jaebeom-hyung knows what he's grovelling for, and Jinyoung-hyung definitely knows, and is letting it happen, but they both don't talk about it?? I don't get it."

Youngjae passes peaceably through, his noise-cancelling headphones firmly on as he bops to a beat only he can hear.

Jaebeom wishes silently and ineffectually that everyone could be like this dongsaeng.

Mark pats Bambam on the head. "Some things you have to grow up to undersatnd."

"What, like you get it?" Bambam demands.

Barking a short, sharp laugh, Mark says, "Fuck no."

Ignoring all of this, Jaebeom pads back into Jinyoung's room.

Jinyoung's back on his bed, stretched out on his side and reading a book that — Jaebeom's heart irrationally skips a beat — that Jaebeom'd left out on the living room table before they'd departed for America.

"Jinyoung-ah," he says, "You haven't changed your sheets in over a month."

"So?"

Jaebeom sighs. "So I'll change them. Get up for a bit, come on."

There's a pause, and then Jinyoung lowers his book to scrutinise him over it.

Jaebeom's hands are abruptly sweaty. He wipes them against the soft cotton of his sweatpants.

"Hyung," Jinyoung starts, frowns, and stops. He looks down at the book, and Jaebeom increasingly feels like the hope that had begun to unfurl under his ribs is withering away slowly, choking his lungs. "Hyung ... I —"

"Let me do this for you," Jaebeom interrupts, impulse taking over his tongue again. "Come on."

Jinyoung's face shivers, like it's on the verge of crumpling, before it smooths out just the same terrifying way it had at that airport in Houston.

"Okay," Jinyoung says, neutral and unsmiling. He clambers off his bed, stepping smoothly over to press himself against a wall and give Jaebeom space to manouevre. "Thank you, hyung."

As he's stripping Jinyoung's bed under Jinyoung's cool and guarded gaze, with the strong, musky scent of boy-sweat and Jinyoung's bodywash rising from the sheets, Jaebeom can't help but feel that he's been granted some kind of boon anyway.

*

> _I'm so selfish, Jinyoung-ah. You've finally learnt your lesson about me, haven't you? There is a me who is glad, because you are protecting yourself. That is the best part of me, probably. But then there is the me who is sad, because I want your smiles, your hand in mine, and for things to go back to the way they were before. I should've kept my course, so things would've been different now. We could've been in a happier place now, right? Good-different. And don't I know it._

*

Here is an episode that stands out with the startling clarity of a shard of crystalline glass:

"I wrote this a while ago," Jinyoung says with a shrug when they're reviewing songs for inclusion in their upcoming album. "It's still passable."

Jaebeom listens to the lyrics, and tries not to wince at how sweetly earnest they are, innocently hopeful and so, so achingly sincere.

"A good concert track," PD-nim says approvingly. "We can spruce it up a bit. Any ideas about what to call it?"

He thinks he feels Jinyoung's eyes on him, if only momentarily. There's no mistaking the weight of his gaze.

"It's a bit cheesy, but ..." Jinyoung trails off in his fake laugh. "Paradise, maybe?"

There is a collective intake of breath from around the table.

When Jaebeom chances a glance up, PD-nim has his terrifyingly plucked eyebrows raised.

"Hyung," complains Yugyeom, breaking the tense silence that fell after they all realised how close they'd come to ... something. "That is _so cheesy_."

"Well," says PD-nim, "what do you think, Jaebeom-ah?"

"Yeah, Leader," lilts Bambam, "what _do_ you think?"

PD-nim squints suspiciously around the table but chooses not to say anything, to their collective relief. Bambam twitches in the distinct way that means Mark has pinched him under the table.

"It fits," Jaebeom says, voice thick in his throat, fighting against the urge to look at Jinyoung; otherwise he'd probably be flinging himself to his knees in the deepest obeisance at his feet, PD-nim's presence be damned. "The fans will like it."

*

Promotions for Arrival start, and Jinyoung-the-idol kicks into high gear.

Jinyoung himself is still maintaining a certain reserve, when it comes to Jaebeom. Jaebeom misses even the pettiness, the brattish teasing that Jinyoung uses to try and get a reaction. He's got his guard up, that's for sure, and Jaebeom feels a little like it's 2013 again. It doesn't help that Youngjae moves out — taking Coco and the emotional ballast that his cheery, good-natured presence brings to all of them with him.

But he plays his role as Jaebeom's counterpart in the shepherding of their merry band of mad fools beautifully. There's something there, anyway, Jaebeom thinks: their personal relationship run ragged by Jaebeom's own missteps aside, it's instinct by now to look to each other in shared exasperation or for backup when a maknae is being obdurate or about to be murdered in cold blood by Mark.

Deja vu unfoots him whenever Jaebeom sees Jinyoung catches himself slipping and weakening his hold on the careful, quiet distance at which he’s keeping them.

At least, Jaebeom thinks, they're both better at acting professionally this time around.

*

They’re on Hongki-hyung’s radio show again, which is almost always guaranteed to be a good time. Jaebeom admires Hongki-hyung’s gregarious charisma, that of a consummate entertainer. It’s not that hard to forget himself a little, in the bounce that Hongki-hyung maintains as a host. It’s fun, and everyone is feeling the high of a good show: it’s in the banter, the ridiculous quiz answers, Youngjae ranking Jinyoung last in terms of visuals — the one person who’d be spared Jinyoung’s wrath.

It’s in the way Jinyoung’s subdued mood lifts. He starts out coming alive only when he has a witty one liner to say or the opportunity arises to tease the babies, and then unexpectedly smiling at Jaebeom as he tells all of Hongkira’s listeners that Jaebeom’s songs were more popular online than their _actual title song_.

The smile comes with a double thumb’s up.

Jaebeom has no idea what to do with himself.

He tells a story about how his voice cracked when they were on this show back during A promotions and can't help but turn to see what jinyoung thinks/check to see how he's reacting. A natural unthinking action that only hits him seconds after jinyoung is already nodding back at him, eyes curved.

So yes: Jaebeom forgets himself enough to pause in the middle of removing his jacket to sling a comforting arm around Jinyoung’s shoulders for a pat when Youngjae jokingly disparages Jinyoung’s face. He forgets himself because of Jinyoung's seal clapping amusement and the sarcastic wrinkle of his eyes that quickly turns genuine, which do something to his insides.

The merriment carries on through, even as Jinyoung collapses onto Mark and holds on for dear life whilst the maknae butcher Big Bang sunbaenim’s _Loser_ and point at Jaebeom; even though it twinges a little because he knows they mean it entirely in jest this time.

*

He’s on his way back from his snack run to the convenience store down the alley when he runs into Sungjin.

“Yah!” Sungjin claps him on the arm, smiling. “I heard you butchered our _Yeppeoseo_ the other day.”

“Oh gods,” Jaebeom says automatically, and then apologetically: “Jinyoungie and I really didn’t prepare the lyrics, I’m sorry.”

Sungjin shrugs, good-natured as usual, and steals an injeolmi snack from the pack that Jaebeom already opened on the walk back. “We don’t remember the lyrics to our own songs half the time anyway.” And then some thought visibly registers on his face and he grins the most terrifyingly shit-eating grin. “And it’s back to 'Jinyoungie' again, is it?”

Jaebeom walks faster in the direction of the dance practice room.

The problem is that Sungjin has a mind of his own, and two feet of his own too.

“It’s so nice to see you again, Jaebeom,” Sungjin sing-songs playfully, entirely bypassing his own practice room. Through the glazed window, Jaebeom can just about make out a few other figures. Wonpil’s definitely the one in fuschia. The door is slightly cracked, so that the sound of cymbals crashing in quick succession and a cheer when Dowoon hits a tom leak through. “We’ve been so busy, you’ve been so busy. Last time I saw you, it was like you were a man on the brink of divorce. Now look at you!”

“What would you know about parents on the brink of divorce?” Jaebeom snaps without meaning to.

Sungjin’s footsteps pause, and he practically radiates regret.

“Jaebeom-ah…”

“It’s fine,” Jaebeom says. He knows that this is Sungjin’s way of talking about things, that he likes approaching things that are difficult to talk about slantwise and with a heavy dose of humour. “I know that’s not what you meant.”

“Still,” Sungjin says solemnly, catching him by the arm and turning him around. Jaebeom honestly can’t remember the last time he’s been around a friend from whom he allows such manhandling. It’s nice. “I should’ve known better.”

It strikes Jaebeom, all of sudden, that Sungjin’s done a lot of his own growing up too.

“Well,” Jaebeom says awkwardly. “Thanks? And it’s not, I mean, there’s nothing to divorce. Work just got stressful. People have disagreements. You know.”

Sungjin snorts and lets go of Jaebeom’s arm. “Work, of course. I remember your fights.”

“It _really_ isn’t —”

“Then you’ve made up?”

Jaebeom hisses in a breath, trying to think of a response more convincing than “kind of”.

Sungjin is about to say something even more tragically incisive, perhaps, when the door to the band practice room opens further, and Jae-hyung yells down the corridor: “Yah! Stop gossiping with Jaebeom! We have a GIG in TWO DAYS to PRACTISE for!”

“Sorry, Jaehyung-hyung!” Jaebeom shouts back with a mix of guilty gratitude, and looks back at Sungjin. “Talk another time, have a good practice.” Sungjin looks like he’s torn between laughing and punching Jaebeom, so Jaebeom starts speed-walking away. “Bye!”

*

> _The thing is, is there ever a time music isn't on my mind? And everything that I've managed to write recently, well, it doesn't need to be said. Even when I'm not writing about — you, and me, and all — this. Even then, everything comes back to you. What stumbles have you not been there for, Jinyoung-ah, which darkest time have you not borne witness to?_
> 
> _And. Just the thought of you is like — like blinkers, for horses. Blinding me to everything else._
> 
>   
_The touch of your gaze, the warmth of your touch. How long has it been? I'm going crazy for want of it. My heart is overriding my mind._

  


  


  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from here on out we enter the territory of "haha fuck i do not have prewritten chapters ready to go anymore" where the weather forecast is an endless drought of "writer has run out of juice"
> 
> pls comment/kudos/RT etc TALK TO ME.


	8. Apr-Aug 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they get better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been a long while! and I think it's worth reading this with [metathesis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19868230) fresh in your minds. because, well, this was always meant to be a companion fic to that. (even if it got away from me ... a lot)
> 
> thank you as always to bysine for your constant encouragement, comments, & suggestions. what would I do without you and potato oppa, what.

* * *

They plunge headlong from their Japanese efforts into preparing for the JJP comeback that they'd never even _dared_ to dream of. Jaebeom hadn't, in any case.

Such strange deja-vu, sitting in front of CEO-nim's desk. Older, wearier, hopefully wiser.

And to be told that they've been greenlighted for a comeback, JJ Project. To be granted so much creative control, because their potential has been sufficiently redeployed, realised, redeveloped.

Jinyoung's voice shakes a bit when he says, "Thank you, sajang-nim."

Jaebeom reaches out to take his hand on pure, thoughtless instinct.

Jinyoung grips back.

*

Writing this album together is like living the extended edition of their old night-time talks, the self-indulgent director's cut but without any of the convenient cinematographic montages speeding through the painful hard work of creation.

With the compressed timeline for producing their second outing as JJ Project, there both is and isn't room for processing ... everything has has happened these past few months — these past few _years_, really.

Jaebeom wonders if he's still being a coward, like this, borrowing the reason of _this is all in service of art_ to bolster his courage. It starts out with showing Jinyoung the early drafts of his songs, as much as he hates opening up anything less than almost-finished for critique. It makes all the nagging feelings of never being good enough surge. And from the way Jinyoung's eyes go round and his mouth falls a little open, he knows.

Of course he knows.

But Jinyoung doesn't waste his time with pleasantries, or asking if Jaebeom is sure.

He just murmurs, "I'm honoured," the sincerity in his voice muting Jaebeom's own incipient nonsensical stammering.

The lyrics are mostly sketched out phrases circling the central idea, with only the chorus mostly put together. He can tell when Jinyoung gets to it, because his eyes flick up and their gazes lock. Jinyoung says nothing, but he tips head to one side as the verse kicks back in, and his lashes lower to half mast as he listens. Jaebeom presses down on one jittering knee while he waits.

Finally, Jinyoung takes the earbuds out of his ears and puts them delicately down on the coffee table. Jaebeom squashes the cushion in his lap hard.

"It's ... a good concept," Jinyoung says. "It fits with the title track." He pauses. His lips tick up minutely on one side. "Or it will, once that track leaves A&R purgatory."

The lick of sheer, classic Jinyoung bitchery in his voice startles Jaebeom into a bark of laughter. It peals a little too loud, and he reflexively slaps the cushion over his face.

Half a minute later, a door creaks open and Yugyeom peers grumpily, squint-eyed, into the living room. "Hyungs," he says, "I'm glad you two are getting on now, but some of us need our beauty _sleep_."

Jinyoung smiles sweetly, devastatingly up at Yugyeom. "I know it's hard when your beauty is dependent on sleep."

Hurriedly, Jaebeom cuts in, "Okay, enough — Gyeom-ah, sorry, I'll keep it down. We're just — deadlines, you know. Jinyoungie..." he trails off as he turns to look pleadingly at Jinyoung.

"Ah, whatever," Yugyeom snorts, and shuffles away, his bedroom door clicking shut behind him.

Jaebeom should feel worse, probably, but the secret little smile playing about Jinyoung's lips makes it really hard. He sighs. "You were saying about this track?"

"I wasn't," says Jinyoung. "But ... ha, it's funny, I'm actually working on something with a similar theme. The lyrics —" and then he unlocks his phone and pokes around in it.

Taking it from him when he holds it out, Jaebeom quickly scans through the draft and feels his eyebrows raise.

"Oh," he says dumbly. "Well. These are. Important stories to tell?"

Jinyoung smiles at him, and it feels like the first proper one he's been on the receiving end of in a while. Just for him; no audience about. "Looks like we both have the same kind of thing on our minds."

So: it is the bringing of that cloistered, under-blanket cosiness forth into broad daylight, expanding beyond the confines of their bedrooms. Jaebeom feels the little bud of confused hope that's taken foolhardy root somewhere around his solar plexus stretch towards the warmth of Jinyoung's sustained attention as they're locked in step together towards a goal common to just them two.

*

Outside, summer unfurls: the air is not yet laden with humidity, a balmy breeze curls along the Han. They go for a stroll precisely once, along tow-paths, and speak in low voices of their uncertainties, of the weight of expectations, of precisely the kind of music they want to make in this album.

"This isn't your usual kind of music," Jinyoung says, as they lean over a metal fence, under some anonymous bridge. They've broken off into a tributary wending its way back through a quiet, residential neighbourhood. Soon it will disappear into the underground sewers, and they'll have to decide on where to go next.

Jaebeom thinks about it. "It is and isn't," he says, trying to put the shape of the music he sees in his head into words. "But I like it. It suits the story we're trying to tell, doesn't it?"

*

It feels like they're fumbling their way back towards _them_, before Jaebeom panicked and fucked it all up, with each half-spoken sentence finished in the other's mouth, each puzzle piece locking into place, each bit of truth confessed through a lyric presented plainly and frankly on paper to the other.

"Hyung," Jinyoung says in that specifically diffident way that means he is anything _but_, late one night in the living room. He's sliding his phone over, offering up a guide version of a track very imaginatively titled _dwk_20170512_v3_ for Jaebeom to listen to. "I think this is almost ready for submission —"

"That's cutting it close."

Jinyoung shrugs, still not looking away. "I wanted your input first." And then, uncharacteristically, he gets up and walks away when Jaebeom slides his headphones on.

"Where are you going?" Jaebeom asks, pulling one muff away.

"I — um. You, um," Jinyoung stammers. "You listen, I'm going to get water."

He takes a long time getting water, but Jaebeom barely notices, caught by the plaintiveness in Jinyoung's singing voice on the refrain. The beat track leaves something to be desired; he wants to switch some things up, cut bits of it out for emphatic silence, but — he has to stop the track halfway through and sit, stunned.

"Jinyoung-ah..." he says, when the man himself cautiously lowers himself to the floor, two glasses in hand. "It's — it's beautiful."

"It's not finished yet," Jinyoung says dismissively.

Jaebeom wants so badly to just reach out and hold his face in his hands.

"So?" he says instead. "It's beautiful anyway. Sad. I — " he bites down everything he wants to say, the apologies that crowd his tongue everytime he wants to say something to Jinyoung. "I do have some ideas and, for the lyrics, just maybe a little reshuffling?"

"Yes," Jinyoung interrupts. He still isn't looking at Jaebeom. "Go ahead. I want this to be..."

After Jinyoung's lapsed into silence for long enough that Jaebeom gets antsy, he prompts, "To be?"

And Jinyoung sighs, hand under his chin and fingers curled about his mouth, so that Jaebeom can't quite make out his full expression. "Ours."

*

One night they go out with the producer hyungs for supper. To be more accurate, they are dragged out of the studio "to let the ideas marinate, you know, like galbi". It's a discreet place down a back alley: small, dimly-lit, and old-fashioned enough that nobody would really expect to see two idols there. Especially when unshaven and puffy-faced from lack of sleep.

The hyungs have gone outside for a smoke, leaving Jaebeom alone with Jinyoung, who's already swaying. His beer bottle is almost empty in front of him and he's picking idly at the remaining bits of sukju namul. Jaebeom wonders if it'd be all right, here in this dimly-lit corner, to tug Jinyoung closer to lean on him.

"You doing okay there, Jinyoung-ah?"

"Mmm?" Jinyoung looks up at him from where he has resorted to leaning his cheek on a palm, elbow anchored against the low table.

Jaebeom laughs, and is about to tease him about the flush in his cheeks, when Jinyoung's gaze wavers and he struggles upright, pointing behind Jaebeom.

"Ah, we don't need anythi —" the words die in Jaebeom's throat when he turns around to see not the friendly ajusshi who's been serving them but a foreigner with coppery hair that isn't dyed and a very particular look on her face. "Uh."

"Hi," she says in faintly accented Korean, bending low so that she isn't towering over them. "I just — noticed you from across the room, and, um —" she holds out a slip of paper, a series of digits printed neatly on it.

This, Jaebeom thinks hysterically, cannot be happening to him. Here of all places, and now, of all times. Also, what is a tourist doing in a place like this?

Jinyoung is, as always, a gravity-distorting presence behind him, a silent observer whose regard burns keenly down Jaebeom's spine.

He's not — he's not interested, but for some reason his tongue is thick and his throat suddenly dry. As the seconds tick by, the young lady's hand starts lowering and mortification grows on her face. Somehow, Jaebeom manages to stammer out a refusal.

When he turns, Jinyoung's eyes flick away to the television replaying _Winter Sonata_ in the corner. His jaw is tight, a muscle jumping in his cheek.

"I wouldn't tell anyone," he says. "Our ban is over."

"I'm not —"

"I don't want to know," Jinyoung says, eyes now fixed on Bae Yong Jun having a lot of emotions. "I'm just saying."

This is absolutely not the place to be having this conversation. The frustration churns in Jaebeom's belly.

He wants to say _you deserve to know_, to say _you have a right to know_, to say _I'm so, so, so sorry_.

Instead, he takes in a steadying breath and tops up Jinyoung's water.

"Okay," he says. "Jinyoung-ah, drink your water or you'll have a bad time tomorrow morning."

_Something_ flashes across Jinyoung's face, but then he's obediently swaying forward to grab his cup. He only spills the water a little; Jaebeom jerks forward to steady his hand, but something makes him freeze again. Maybe it's the look in Jinyoung's eyes as Jaebeom got closer, like a cornered animal.

The tension breaks, or is at least buried, when the producer hyungs flood back into the room, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and shouting about something or other.

Jinyoung falls easily back into conversation about the latest drama that the Royal Dive hyungs' partners have been following and the relative acting merits of its leads. Whilst Jaebeom is distracted by an argument about which club to book for the next showcase, Kyungil-hyung has managed to convince Jinyoung to try a shot of soju.

"Hyung!" Jaebeom protests, taking the shot glass away and putting it on his far side. "You're not the one who's going to have to take care of him!"

The look that is shot at Jaebeom is flaying, whilst Jinyoung sways into his shoulder and stays there, snuffling in amusement over some private joke.

"Don't you take care of him anyway, Jaebeom-ah?"

"Yeah," chimes in one half of Royal Dive from Jaebeom's other side. Merciful Boddhisattva, he's just surrounded by the enemy. "Leader-hyung-nim."

"Has Jinyoungie ever called Jaebeom that?" says the other half of Royal Dive.

"Not in front of us anyway."

They're worse than those twin brothers of Harry Potter's best friend.

"I," announced Jaebeom, "am ordering a car."

The water that Jaebeom plies Jinyoung with, together with the taxi ride home, doesn't sober Jinyoung up nearly as much as Jaebeom had hoped. He ends up having to sling Jinyoung's arm around his shoulders and half-carry him back through the dorm.

Bambam, up to get a midnight snack, watches their progress through the dorm with raised eyebrows.

"Thanks for your help, Bam-ah," Jaebeom says drily.

Around the spoon of yoghurt in his mouth, Bambam says, "Oh po'wem!"

"Please," Jaebeom says, "can you get Jinyoung's fucking door."

After deposits Jinyoung in bed, fully-clothed, he stands and stares at him for a few seconds too long. He can't help it — he smoothes Jinyoung's hair back from his forehead before turning to go.

Fingers catch in the back of his shirt.

"Hyung." His voice is small.

Jaebeom takes another deep, cleansing breath, before turning to crouch by the bed. "Yeah?"

"I meant it," Jinyoung says, "I won't tell. If you ... the phone number..."

Something sour licks around under Jaebeom's ribs.

"I mean it too when I say I'm not interested, Jinyoung-ah."

Jinyoung's eyes open; they're alcohol-glossy and red-rimmed. "What do you mean?"

"I mean ..." Jaebeom sighs and sits down, cross-legged, to rest his chin on the mattress edge. He's tired, too, physically and in the depths of his heart. Tired of trying to pretend this away, tired of hiding. "I mean I'm not interested in her. Not in anyone else."

Jinyoung blinks stickily at him. "Else?" His voice has gone all sweet and small, like it rarely ever does unless in jest these days.

"I mean," Jaebeom trips on, fumbling for words that won't come. "I mean just that."

This close to the edge of sleep, Jinyoung's masks have all fallen away; his face is nothing but soft and scared and honest, his heart laid bare for Jaebeom to flay himself at the altar of.

He yawns a little, frowns around it. "I can't ..."

Afraid to break Jinyoung's train of thought, but equally afraid to leave him hanging for a response, Jaebeom hums formlessly, gripping at the rough denim stretching over his calves. Jaebeom does his best not to blink as Jinyoung gazes at him, his eyes flicking up, down, left, right; he's looking for something, but Jaebeom doesn't know what.

"You've become a really good leader, hyung," Jinyoung says quietly, eyes drifting shut. Jaebeom watches the way his eyelashes kiss the soft tops of his soju-flushed cheeks. "But I can't ... trust you so much again. Yet. Maybe?" he drifts off a little, mouth pursed as though caught mid-word. Jaebeom thinks he might've fallen asleep when his eyes open abruptly, that dark gaze arresting and a jolt to the system, every single time. "You know, right?"

Just because Jaebeom knows what he's lost doesn't mean it doesn't hurt to hear, doesn't mean it doesn't feel like his entire thoracic cavity has abruptly filled with vinegar, his heart clenching painfully.

"I know," he says, and crumbles a little. He lets himself raise a hand, lets himself close the gap in the private, warm, cloister of Jinyoung's dimly lit room, lets himself brush the backs of his knuckles down Jinyoung's cheek. Sees and feels the way Jinyoung presses briefly into the touch, his lashes trembling against his cheek as his eyes fall shut again.

He listens to Jinyoung's wheezing breaths evening out, before promising, "I'll earn it again."

*

Jaebeom feels expansive, under these soaring blue skies and the mountains in the distance, the trees, the clean scouring air. Lighter, even though the days are hectic and they have a packed shooting schedule. Some of it might also have to do with not having to track six other chaos agents; Jinyoung definitely agrees:

He grins at Jaebeom when they're bumping along a dirt track to their shooting site.

"It's peaceful, isn't it? Quiet."

Jokingly, Jaebeom says, "I'd almost forgot what that sounded like."

In the front seat, their manager snorts. "You two sound like my brother and his wife when we babysit for them."

"Oh, come on, hyung," Jinyoung says, apparently entirely unruffled, whilst Jaebeom's struggling to process the implications. "Like _you_ aren't enjoying this reprieve either."

"No comment."

"So diplomatic."

"It's part of the entrance tests. All those scenario-based questions."

Jinyoung sighs and turns again to look at Jaebeom. Smiling conspiratorially, he says, "At least all we had to do was dance, right?"

"And sing," Jaebeom says in their defence. "And... walk in a straight line."

"To be fair," Kisoon-hyung says, "you were children and I was an actual adult when they hired me."

Somewhere far over their heads and towards the seaward mountains, an eagle kyries. It's the first time in Jaebeom's _life_ he's heard a call like this, and it strikes him to the quick.

Unflappable, unmoved, and deeply unromantic, Kisoon-hyung comments, "Aha. Even the forces of nature agree with me."

"That's so strange to think about," Jinyoung muses. "We _were_ children. We were so _young_."

Jaebeom smiles a little to himself, and then hopefully across the middle seat at Jinyoung. "We've come a long way."

Maybe because he's spent such a long time looking, such a long time watching, but he sees the way Jinyoung's face softens, the little quirk of his lips.

"We have," Jinyoung murmurs, before turning to look out his own window at the verdant greenery blurring by outside.

It doesn't weigh on his mind, not exactly, but it is a layer of contemplation, a fine net that settles over everything like sand: how long their lives have been entwined, and how, despite everything, Jinyoung's still by his side.

Literally, as they drive in fits and starts along a dirt track somewhere in rural Hokkaido, Jaebeom putting his skill at driving extremely slowly in a carpark to the test as he is instructed to drive slowly and smoothly as he can over _rough terrain_.

He's so relieved to be told that they're going to give up on the moving car scenes he doesn't even feel like complaining about being told to look wistfully into the waist-high waving grass that's, in reality, really kind of scratchy.

"You should ask Sungjin-hyung how he did it for their MV last month. Or was it the month before?" Jinyoung says when Jaebeom expresses this sentiment in an undertone to him when they have been freed from the grass to walk contemplatively down sun-warm tarmac.

Jaebeom knows it's sun-warm because he's lying down on it, and feeling very nervous about some Japanese trucker trundling down the road before he can get out of its way. He's been assured that they have scouts set up and that this is a road mostly used for tractors, which is —

"Very reassuring," Jinyoung drily says, before walking off to his mark.

With the stored heat of the tarmac seeping into the muscles of his constantly aching back and the cool breeze rippling through the trees bordering the road, Jaebeom very nearly falls asleep, distant threat of being rolled flat by enormous tractor wheels aside.

Jaebeom drifts to the sound of some very early cicadas shirring away in the woods, layered over by the high calling of unknown birds echoing down the valley. The camera crew fade into the periphery of his awareness, as he lets his consciousness spiral out from this one warm spot, feeling the backs of his calves, thighs, shoulders sink down into the earth.

"Hyung, don't fall asleep there."

The words take a the span between a few heartbeats to sink in, and then he remembers — ah, the MV, the crew, Jinyoung.

"I wasn't," he says, blinking his eyes open, and lifting his head a little to check on the director.

When he turns his head the other way, Jinyoung's got a funny little smile on his face, pushing his cheeks up just enough to hint at his aegyo-sal.

"I guess you're good _on the road_ when it's literal," Jinyoung says, laughter simmering under his even tone.

Jaebeom groans and sits up. "That was bad, even for you, Jinyoung-ah."

Ignoring him, Jinyoung says, "I'm not wrong, though, am I?"

"I can drive perfectly well."

"Those cut scenes indicate otherwise." Jinyoung pauses. "Good thing Sungjin-hyung is here to protect the reputation of JYP idols who drive."

Jaebeom huffs. "That guy drives way more often than I get to."

All Jinyoung does is laugh at him. He's been in a very good mood ever since he stepped out of the front door of their hotel, this morning, and sucked in one great, deep lungful.

There's something in the unpolluted air here, crisp and cold and smelling of early sap, and the way the mountains haze blue into the horizon, the green grasslands and copses of trees both like and unlike the countryside back home — a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, maybe, that makes it easier to lose himself in the moment.

To just live in this long, perfect moment.

Maybe the only thing that would make this better is if the illusion were real, and he and Jinyoung really were the only ones in all this vast, unpeopled place.

Even if it weren't part of the project, Jaebeom would be snapping away with his camera anyway. It's another sign of the times, perhaps, of the changes that have been wrought in their lives — that _they_ have wrought in their own lives: the marketing team taking into account their tastes, hobbies, inclinations.

But there is in any case so much to see here, so many fleeting vignettes that catch the eye: the shadow of a bird on the grass; a path of wildflowers in the middle of a meadow; dry leaves nestled in the hollow of a tree. And then there is Jinyoung — of whom it is so easy for anyone who hasn't known him so long to forget — who grew up a nature boy.

He finds himself humming the song under his breath as he steals snapshots of Jinyoung walking along the verge, the soft curve of his cheek turned down and away, almost shy in the way his body curves away from the mass of the crew.

Jaebeom is trying to find exactly the right balance between aperture and shutter speed when the actual, official photographer comments from right next to him, "That's an old song."

Startled, Jaebeom jerks and almost slips.

"Ah, sorry, sorry."

"No," Jaebeom shakes his head and gives up, letting his camera-holding arm hang loose by his side. "It's fine, I was just experimenting."

That gets him a genuine smile. "That's part of the process. How about I take a photograph of you doing — just that?"

So Jaebeom's smiling, genuinely amused, as he holds his camera up to his eye and adjusts the focus, the depth of field, the — oh, that's Jinyoung, barely in the frame as he comes up behind their photographer's shoulder.

"That's a fun photo," Jinyoung remarks, his voice all mellow amber. "Look at that, photographer Im Jaebeom."

Helplessly, Jaebeom smiles back, and the shutters pointed at him go off.

"Ah," says Jinyoung, leaning in to look at the preview screen on the enormous DSLR. "You look very handsome hyung."

Jaebeom's left blinking, doing his best to stop his heart from tripping somersaults, even as they're chivvied along to the next shooting spot.

"I learnt about this English phrase," Jinyoung tells him, a few minutes later, whilst they're balancing on a fence and being told to turn this way and that without falling off. "Memento mori."

"Meme— what?"

"Memento mori," Jinyoung repeats slowly. "Objects that remind you of the presence of death."

They're not facing each other, so Jaebeom can only blink slowly at the stand of some kind of broad, leafy trees in the meadow across the way, and then raise his eyes further to the distant grey-brown mountains still streaked with snow, all the way across the hummocking farmlands draped in fresh spring green. This land is full of growing things: budding, thriving, _living_.

"That's ... morbid," he says. "What made you think of that?"

But then they have to stop talking and start making pensive, close-mouthed faces instead, so Jaebeom only gets his answer when they're bumping along back to their hotel for the night.

"With the photographs we're taking," Jinyoung says, still gazing out the window on his side. Jaebeom doesn't understand what he's looking at; night has fully fallen, but the town they're lodging in is still a cluster of yellow lights down the road. "I just ... you know, you think about framing, about what looks good, about ... contrast."

"Ah."

"And even when I look at these beautiful things, and hear them and smell them ..." Jinyoung sighs a little, and shifts over so he's curled into the corner between door and seat. "You can't help but think, right? One day this all will come to an end. Winter comes, and everything withers."

Jaebeom's about to respond when Kisoon-hyung heaves the heaviest of sighs from the driver's seat.

"Can you please talk about something less depressing? Or shall I change the music?"

The radio's been set to some local station that's been playing Japanese _enka_, crackly with static. Jaebeom's been quite enjoying it honestly.

"I like the station, hyung," he says, and grins when Kisoon-hyung sighs again. "Jinyoung-ah, but spring follows winter, right? And then you have growth again."

"Not if it's nuclear winter," Jinyoung points out mulishly, and then Jaebeom realises that he's just _over-tired_.

"If it's nuclear winter we're all dead anyway, and there's nothing to feel sad about," he says, and dares to reach over to pat Jinyoung's knee. "Let's just nap, huh? It's been a long day."

The next day is a long one too, even though time doesn't seem to run quite the same way out here. Even with the production managers' meticulously timetabled clipboards and the buzz of an entire crew setting up, tearing down, and setting up again, Jaebeom still feels a little like he's on holiday. The sort of holiday, maybe, when they're let free to roam (with a pack of people shadowing him) and do as they like (without ruining their styling), but still.

Under the deep blue skies streaked with thin white clouds, it's so easy to feel detached, to sink into the feeling of cosmic insignificance and take comfort in it.

"The philosophy is catching," Jinyoung says, when Jaebeom tries to relate some of this. "Kisoon-hyung will be so upset."

Mildly affronted, Jaebeom says, "I can philosophise all on my own!"

"Yes, yes," soothes Jinyoung, indulgence honeying his voice, drowning Jaebeom.

They've finished exploring the cabin in which they will be filming their indoor scenes, and are now sitting in creaky old rattan chairs, out on the cabin deck. There's travelling mugs of roasted barley tea, Jaebeom's squashed between his legs as he leans his forearms on the railing and watches the sky deepen slowly into dusk.

The cabin is perched on a rolling hillock, the deck facing out onto the long dip into even more grassland. Somewhere amongst those trees, now casting long shadows in blue and grey across the muting grass, is the large pond Jaebeom walked halfway around earlier in the day. He'd managed to pick his way out to the odd tree growing on a little islet. It had made for a very good photograph; it had made for taking very good photographs.

"It'd be nice," he muses absently, eyes still on the way the sun is a brilliant vermillion coin sinking behind the ridgeline, staining the skies deep pink and gold. A murmuration of starlings turn and twist against this backdrop, taking both his breath and train of thought away.

Next to him, Jinyoung hums in question. "Nice?"

"Ah." Jaebeom chases the stray strand of a dream, catches the wistful end of it, reels the thought back in. "To come back here for a proper trip, you know? Without any schedules to keep to."

The only reply he receives is a long, low sigh, and a murmured "Mmmmm".

He isn't prepared when he turns to glance at Jinyoung; not for the way Jinyoung's lounging in his chair, louche and elegant as any lordling; nor the way the deep golden light of dusk gilds his hair and limns the softness of his face; nor the heart-seizing shadows painting mystery over his expression.

Jinyoung is so achingly beautiful, even without the setting to match him.

He gets ignobly caught, when Jinyoung turns suddenly around, lips parted on a question. His eyes go round, though, when he sees that Jaebeom's already gazing at him with — Jaebeom tries to school his face.

"What?" Jinyoung asks, his voice half-air as he laughs in the way that means he's feeling self-conscious.

Jaebeom shakes his head, tries to shake the thoughts loose. The motion brings what's in his hands back into his awareness.

He holds up his camera, invents the world's flimsiest excuse: "Just thinking about framing. Do you mind?"

Jinyoung frowns at him, and it feels like very single one of Jaebeom's internal organs quake.

"Why would I?”

"Oh, well," Jaebeom flusters, casting about for some kind of plausible reason, because — because, well, why _would_ Jinyoung mind? They spend half their lives being photographed half by people they don't even know, and half the time without being asked for permission.

To his relief, Jinyoung takes pity on him and says with only the slightest bit of irony: "That's okay, I'll just go back to sitting here and looking pretty."

Jaebeom laughs and brings his camera up to his face.

"Yeah," he says, unable to disagree, relief making his head light. "You do that, Jinyoungie."

*

The album drop and rest of the promotions seem to be like a dream. The best kind; the kind that you don't really want to wake up from.

He's so excitable that one of their manager noonas, usually unflappable in the face of massive plane delays and the loss of an entire make-up kit that apparently had cost thousands, reaches up to grab him by the scruff of the neck, hauls him down, and barks, "Sit!"

"Where on earth is Jinyoung when you need him," she mutters to their head stylist.

He grins up at her, bouncing a little, puppyish and feeling like nothing could contain him.

Well, perhaps noona's death glare, but even then —

The dancers conspire to distract him with jacks, and then Jinyoung's popping back in from MCing for a rest and it seems like the entire room heaves a sigh of relief.

Sensitive as ever, Jinyoung pauses about two steps into the door and looks suspiciously around.

The "what's going on?" is already leaving his lips when Jaebeom — abruptly loses the thread of his thoughts. He'd wanted to tell Jinyoung about absolutely smashing it at jacks, maybe, or just show him stickied parts of the book he'd been too excited to focus on, but now he just wants to sit and let the conversational flow take them where it will.

"Your leader," says terrifying manager noona, "is behaving like a toddler."

"Oh." Jinyoung looks at him, and there's a flash of smugness across his face before it's replaced by a playful kind of haughtiness; it's all in the raise of his eyebrows and pout of his lips. "Really, hyung?"

"I can't help it if I'm happy," Jaebeom protests.

"Oh god," mutters their hairstylist noona, not quite as _sotto voce_ as she probably wants. "It's hopeless. We're doomed."

"Oh, well," Jinyoung says, and smiles. It's a little conspiratorial, a lot mischievous, and douses Jaebeom in warmth. "If it's about your _happiness_."

*

> _This seems the best kind of dream — Jinyoung-ah, we are finally on the same page — I've finally caught up to you. Let's write our story together from now on. _

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'nature boy', the old song that jaebeom hums, is a lovely jazz standard originally recorded by [nat king cole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw).
> 
> I think I get jb to a good place here, and tonally ... thematically ... it's a good place to end. you could also say I am jaebeom-ing the ending of this story, a la bysine's [joseon zombie AU](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20451341)!jaebeom. but really: I'm also about 90% out of the jjp writing zone*, and looking at the rest of my outline just made me want to lie down on my face, so. there will be outtakes if you are so interested. 
> 
> this rounds off with an epilogue, which I will post right after this chapter.
> 
> *youngpil blindsided me out of nowhere and now i'm just being attacked by (A) plunnies; (B) how incomprehensibly attractive yh is every day. i've written 2 fics and have another one in the works and just. i just listen to what my heart is telling me, okay?


	9. epilogue (2022)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a pause, and a new beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I'll post the rest of my 2018-2022 outline & outtakes from there -- since I do have some written out bits from various ... """plot""" points -- in a separate work, to avoid wordcount inflation.)

* * *

He doesn't quite know what to expect when Jinyoung asks him to come over.

They're in the midst of their preparations for their farewell series of fanmeeting tours, having just finished a month of comeback promotions and variety shows.

Jaebeom would've thought that Jinyoung would want a break from seeing him — or seeing any other human being, to be honest — on the rare day off that they've been granted to recuperate.

The bareness of Jinyoung's usually cluttered coffee table makes him raise an eyebrow, as does presence of the bucket in which Jinyoung keeps his souvenir maps.

And then Jinyoung theatrically unfolds a map, flaps it open and flat on his table. He must've practised that.

When he looks at the map properly, though, Jaebeom's heart starts thudding, his pulse roaring in his ears.

The shape of that island is familiar: it's Hokkaido, and then further down south, the larger Honshu, and the rib of mountains running parallel to its northern flank, shaded in green and pinkish-grey and brown.

Jinyoung points at a random spot that Jaebeom is fairly certain they've never been to before, in all of their Japanese activities.

As Jinyoung talks; his words trip over themselves, a little, like he's nervous.

Anticipation grows, a potent joy bubbling up under Jaebeom's ribs.

This is it, he thinks: potential finally converting into action.

Jinyoung pauses in the middle of his sales pitch, as though Jaebeom needed to be convinced.

Uncertainty creeps into the fringes of his expression and Jaebeom cannot wait to get to put his fingers on Jinyoung's face and wipe all that away.

"Beom-ah," he says, "I mean, you don't have to — I — are you sure you want to go on this with me?"

Is Jaebeom _sure_.

"Yes," Jaebeom says. "Stupid."

His heart beats a steady affirmation: _Yes, yes, yes._

*******

**You're the start and the end**  
**Of my own desire**  
**You’re the place I’ll find**

  


  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * the ending quote is from [treasure island](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcX1f1dM2SI), by MILLIC ft. Han (not of skz). it just struck me to the quick from the opening chords, and the singer's whispery, confessional vocals with those lyrics just make my heart seize up with longing even as I listen to it whilst writing up these notes tonight. 
>   * it's been a bewildering, exhausting, exhilarating time with jjp <3 (and you bet they'll just show up in all their high drama/incredible marriedness in the background of my day6 fic) 
>   * thank you all for your patience, and for reading this. as always, if this made you feel a ling, please let me know in the comments, kudos, [ retweet](https://twitter.com/forochel/status/1233775901374107648), etc. 
>   * stay health & happy, & make sure to wash your hands >30 seconds, to cough into your sleeves, and to practise social responsibility, friends!


End file.
